\ HALF A GUINEA PER ANNUM & UPWARDS THE DESIRABLE ALIEN AT HOME IN GERMANY THE DESIRABLE ALIEN AT HOME IN GERMANY . BY VIOLET HUNT . WITH PREFACE AND TWO ADDITIONAL CHAPTERS BY FORD MADOX HUEFFER ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ LONDON . CHATTO AND WINDUS IN ST. MARTIN'S LANE , MCMXIII TO MRS. OSWALD CRAWFURD WHO LED ME INTO GERMANY PREFACE I SHOULD call this a very satisfactory book about a country I mean that, at the end of reading it, the reader will have been presented with a certain number of views, and that those views square roughly with my own or those of any other man of good-will. And any book about a country upon any other lines cannot well be a satisfactory perfor- mance. Any man may say, " I know my Germany," as any other may say that he knows his London, and he may, indeed, have a knowledge of a country or of a city that is based upon long residence in the one or the other and that is fortified by many statistics. Yet countries, cities, and the hearts of men, are regions so wide, or, as it were, streams so profound, that it would appear that there is no man fitted to write a book of a factual kind about any city, any country, or, for the matter of that, about any single human being. For, as far as facts go, we have nothing but them to go upon ; and facts are selected for us either by blind Destiny that will have forced us into certain paths, or by our own inborn predilections that set us wandering about a country, directed to certain regions by who knows what ? by the recommenda- vii viii PREFACE tions of friends, in search of the footsteps of the dead, or by the desire to slake the thirsts of our geologists' hammers in certain exposed beds of schist. Destiny might make you an Interpreter situated at Essen, or a British Consular Represent- ative at Frankfurt ! How different would be your views of a country that for me is partly Muenster in Westphalia, with its dark arcades and its history of blood, and that is still more the Rhine between Koblenz and Assmanshausen, where life lives itself so pleasantly. Essen is all coal-dust, grime, and the resounding of mighty hammers ; Frankfurt is all banks, diamonds, gilding, prostitutes, theatres, art centres. Which, then, is Germany, and could any one soul give you uncoloured facts about both ? It is unthinkable. If you live in Frankfurt you will say that Germany is the most cultured, the richest, the most practical of all the States. You may realize that there is Essen, where the guns come from. Or, if you live on the Rhine, you may well say that the German is the gayest, the most careless, the most musical, of pleasant men since Ireland has become sober and has cultivated a Middle Class. It is probable that first impressions will colour all that you see. The one-time Consul-General of a Southern kingdom assured me solemnly, after he had lived for fourteen years in England, that Eng- land is the most dangerous of all countries. On his landing at Dover he had come across some three-card-trick gentry who had given him a rough time ; it was the only adventure that ever occurred to him in this country, yet he felt himself far safer PREFACE ix in his own country, where the gaols are filled with revolutionists and forty men a day are shot in the streets. You will see this irresistible tendency at work in the author of this book. Her first impressions came from Milly of Paderborn, who was, thank goodness, a good Westphalian, an echte Saeurlaenderin and from the good Grimm ! So our author is predis- posed to like the Germans, to look upon them with a friendly and indulgent eye, to find them instinct with all the old Germanic virtues of kindliness, hospitality, modesty, and sobriety. You see, her first impressions are formed by a Germany of the pre-Franco-Prussian War type. God forbid I should say that these early German pieties have gone out of my countrymen ! But, were I writing a book about Germany, I think that I should see first what Bismarckism, Nietzscheism, and agnosticism of the Jatho type have made of the land of the good Grimm. It is all so very bewildering, and statistics are of no particular good. Last year I was sitting talking to an Imperial Forester upon a stump in a wood near his Foersterei. He insisted that he had been taught in school that witches and warlocks exist. He was a youngish, quite intelligent man. I said it was impossible that he could have been taught that in a German public school six years ago. He said, " Wait !" and went into his cottage. He came out with his school textbook of Goethe's " Faust " ; he turned over the leaves until he came to the scene of the Walpurgisnacht on the Brocken. "There !" he said triumphantly. Yet statistics will prove to x PREFACE you that Germany is the best educated land in the world. God forbid that I should say that Germany is not the best instructed of all lands. It probably is ; though the most looked up to of all modern novelists and thinkers of England of to-day lately assured me that English primary instruction is by a long way the best in the world ; we must not, however, say so for fear of the ratepayers. He may be right. Yet, as I have elsewhere related, I had once a small servant who had just passed the sixth standard in a national school and had just been confirmed. She refused to accompany the family to Germany for fear, if the ship sank in the Channel, the fishes should eat her soul. . . . So you have here a book of impressions. If I did not like it I should not be writing this intro- duction ; if I had not very much admired the kindly, careless, inaccurate, and brilliantly precise mind of the author, I presume the book would never have been written. The blind destiny which watches over these things would never have taken the writer into my beloved country. For, after all, it is my beloved country. ... A year or so ago I should have said that I detested the Prussianism of the congeries of nations that Germany is. Then came the Agadir affair with its revelation of the inherent financial weakness of the Kaiserreich. Now we have the image of a Germany threatened with immense Slav empires, kingdoms, and states. . . . And I confess that I should hate the thought that this proud people, full of free passions, should cease to bulk large in the comity of the nations. ... I PREFACE xi should hate to think that one of the horned golden standards that are borne at the heads of so many regiments and their feet literally make the earth tremble upon the Exerzierplaetze that one of these, amidst the smoke of battle, should fall into alien hands. The other day, over the door of a dormitory in a French barracks, I read the words : " Soldiers ! Three standards of your regiment are in the Im- perial Museum at Potsdam. Never forget !" Queer words to read ! France is the darling of the nations the Playboy of the Western world ! To France, in the end, we all owe everything that in the realm of the ideas is worth having. And I think that, in the bottom of a sentimental heart, I should like to see France regain her lost provinces, because France has been crest- fallen about it. And I think all nature loves a swaggerer and hates to see his downfall. For in this dreary world there is so little happiness. . . . But, if France regained its loss, Germany, to make the fairy-tale complete, must have its place in the sun, and Great Britain must lose nothing either. I do not know how that quart is going to be got into that pint pot. . . . Anyhow, such a book as " The Desirable Alien " can do nothing but good in the sense of letting people understand each other better. It is better than statistics of armaments, for these can be manoeuvred to prove anything the writer likes ; it is better than the pompous analysis of national traits, better than the analysis of mineral wealths. For it lets us come a little nearer, seeing that there is no such thing as Germany as distinct from Eng- xii PREFACE land ; no such thing as England as distinct from the wide lands from the Rhine to the Elbe. It shows and that is the note of the modern world that people are just people, taking twopenny tram- tickets from Ealing to the City or from Ringstrasse to the Domplatz, doing their best to keep their ends up in the struggle of an industrial existence, cultivating as best they may the muses upon a little thin oatmeal, thinking precious little or nothing at all about dark machinations for the flinging of troops into either East Anglia or the flat lands behind Borkum but just people like you and me and the man who opens the, taxi-cab door for you on the rank. FORD MADOX HUEFFEtf. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAfiB I. INTRODUCTION : HOW ONE BECOMES AN ALIEN I II. HAREM SKIRTS, STORKS, AND SOME SOCIAL AMENITIES 17 III. SLEEPY HOLLOW 30 IV. UTOPIA 45 v. PAX GERMANICA: SERVANTS, FAIRY TALKS, AND TAILORS 52 VI. BEER GARDENS V. BEAR GARDENS 65 VII. PRINCES AND PRESCRIPTIONS 88 VIII. BLUE PATES AND SCHOPPEN Io6 IX. CHESTS AND COSTUMES 124 X. WAITERS AND POLICEMEN 14! XI. A LANDGRAFIN AND HER CONFESSOR 152 XII. LIONS AND LACE CURTAINS l6l XIII. GRAND DUKES AND GIPSIES 173 XIV. GREAT DANES, GEESE, MICE, AND SCHOOLMASTERS 182 XV. " DRIZZLING " AND OFFICERS 198 XVI. HOW IT FEELS TO BE MEMBERS OF SUBJECT RACES 2IO XVII. QUEENS DISCROWNED 22O XVIII. BONES, BABIES, AND ANABAPTISTS 2$O XIX. CELLE 258 XX. TRIER 269 XXI. " TAKE US THE LITTLE FOXES " 293 XXII. ENVOI 321 Xlll THE DESIRABLE ALIEN AT HOME IN GERMANY CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION : HOW ONE BECOMES AN ALIEN SOME persons are, of course, born Germans ; some achieve citizenship of that great and good nation. Others, again, have the honour thrust upon them. And one fine day I found myself in the last category of all, with no reluctance, but through no fault of my own. And I took to my new position quite kindly ; even some earth-shaking ceremonies through which I, in common with my nation of origin, had lately passed, did not awaken in me any unpleasant sense of what I was forfeiting in the exchange. King George was no King of mine, though he was doubt- less to prove a very agreeable King to live under. So it appeared to me on that particular day in June, as I sat at ease on a deal bench covered with red baize, built right over the statue of Disraeli, another alien, whom one half of the English nation at least regards as eminently desirable, and surveyed the new King of England's acclaimed and gracious progress through the capital of his lieges. 2 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. i Everything all round me was fairly, orderly, almost Germanly managed ; and that reminded me of the folk-tale now quite embedded in the English popular consciousness, of the "Oysters and the Carpenter." The white roads shone in the sun; the hoardings were painted in chaste linear sten- cilled patterns ; the usually dirty buildings above, where no hoardings could reach, seemed polished, but King George's police had contrived to arrange matters so beautifully ; they had taken such care that everybody should see the Procession in safety that in the end there was hardly anybody there to see it! The whole thing was a triumph of order; but where were the ordered ? The streets were cleared for the people who were cleared away ! Just a week before the ceremony of the Corona- tion I had marched, along with forty thousand Englishwomen, through the streets of this alien capital, clamouring peacefully, constitutionally, for the gift of the vote ; and my legs still ached at the mere thought of those five hours' stringent exer- cise. But I now realized suddenly the fact that when the vote was won, I, as an alien, would never walk on those same legs to the poll along with my fellow-workers, for I had chosen to belong to a country where women do not even dream of eman- cipation a country where a wife's income, though not her capital, belongs to her husband, and where that husband may divorce her, willy-nilly, if she should even so much as insist on wearing colours that happen to jar on him. I brooded over all the privileges which I had foregone as I sat, appropriately enough, on the CH. ij HOW ONE BECOMES AN ALIEN 3 English Foreign Office seats, among other desirable aliens, or, as some people would prefer to phrase it, with John Ruskin, among " persons of a certain order in the abyss." For cheap patriotism may run to such forms of ignorant depreciation. I remember the noble rage of the French father of a friend of mine who had married an Englishman, as he recounted to me, long afterwards, his son-in-law's grudging appre- ciation of papa " Very intelligent for an English- man !" Shortly before, he had informed him that " clever " was a word for human beings, but that " intelligent " could only be used of animals. Yet these good people collected with me on the Foreign Office stand were mostly foreign, all of them well dressed, and presumably quite intelligent. They were by no means downhearted or in the least " out of it," for salutes were continually passing between the un-English occupants of these benches and the equally un-English occupants of the State carriages. I saw my Grand Duke,* the " boss " of my particular province, drive by with his Grand Duchess. In our own principality, so I am told by Joseph Leopold, his name is a name of awe; here My august Sovereign, Ernest Ludwig Grossherzog von Hessen- Darmstadt und bei Rhein, was, I do not know why, the only Sove- reign Prince present at the Coronation of King George V. It is, that is to say, considered a solecism to allow any crowned Sove- reign to be present at this ceremony, because he must take prece- dence of the British Sovereign, as yet uncrowned. Why, therefore, one of the Grand Dukes of Hessen-Darmstadt should have been present I do not know, for they certainly do not take rank below any of the other confederate Princes of the German Empire. J. L. F. M. H. 4 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. i he is apt to get casually designated as " a German Princeling" or "some Serenity or other." But he is certainly excessively intelligent, and his Grand Duchess as narrow and conventional as the most straight-laced Duchess of the Dukeries ; while, moreover, she of Hessen-Darmstadt has a good deal more control of les mceurs in her department, and possibility of asserting her wishes. In fact, she has the powers of a Queen Consort. In the distance, did I but raise my eyes, I could see the chimneys of My Embassy. And in the road below smart officers of My nationality rode abreast, wearing the handsome uniform of Prussia ; but, thank God I am advised to thank God I need not call myself a Prussian, though, perforce, the Kaiser a " sacred " Prussian has constituted himself my First War Lord. All this added immensely to the significance of the Procession. I found it hardly possible to be quite frivolous in the face of the tremendous volte- face that I have made. The signs, the symptoms, of it were all in the air on that English fete-day. It remains intangible, mostly made up of symbols and change of symbols ; but it gives one to think. Artists are supposed to have less sense of nationality less patriotism, if you like to put it so than other people. And I hope I am an artist. Anything to excuse my lack of sense of Empire ! I am sure I should duly say in a crisis : " My country, right or wrong !" and I am glad to think I did not flaunt my Pro-Boerdom during the war, any more than I would choose to " swap " horses in the middle of the stream. But in time of peace CH. i] HOW ONE BECOMES AN ALIEN 5 I am only too ready to say that my country is in the wrong; and I do not think that the Germans, therefore, got a very good bargain in me. Yet my Tedescan sympathies were fairly de- veloped ; the process was begun by my father and mother, with prophetic insight, perhaps, from my earliest years. German nurses cuffed me and hushed me in my wicked and virtuous moods respectively, till I knew their language a good deal better than my own, and an order, to be respected and duly carried out, had to be given to me in German. A German nurse from Paderborn, called Milly, tried to implant in me and my sisters, I fancy, the first glimmerings of that meticulous attention to detail, that respect for the printed word, that habit of patient martyrdom to authority, which I consider distinguishes Milly's fellow-countrymen and women. Even when, later, I had a French nurse, she was only a German in disguise, and had been turned out of Paris sent away by the last train as a spy, at the beginning of the siege. My Germanhood was obviously Fate. The cook was in the habit of sending up three lightly boiled eggs for the nursery breakfast. Milly then arranged my two sisters and myself in a row at stated distances from where she sat in the middle with her spoon. Like a nestful of young ravens or a posse of young calves, this careful woman fed us. She took the three eggs seriatim, putting a portion into each little open mouth in rotation, beginning with the eldest. It was as much as our places were worth to murmur, and that is how, now that I have come to years of discretion, I understand why the German system of State Insurance, which is the 6 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. i model for the one that has been set up, amid tears, in England, came to be so patiently tolerated, years ago, in Germany. For in so slight a matter as the degustation of three eggs, three free-born English children were aligned, tabulated, fitted into system, and we re- belled far less than I have seen a troop of calves do, fed in the same arbitrary way, on pailsful of skim milk. Once and once only, at the age of four, I rebelled against some other of Milly's petty laws of the nursery. I called her a " nasty cat." Germans hate cats ; and Milly felt it deeply. But no nursery rights or privileges equally systematized they were, too were mine until, at the end of three days, I begged Milly's august pardon. Nowadays, I should not hesitate so long as that, especially with a German. For as often as I " come right up against " this highly organized and quite arbitrary system do I realize that in willing or even sulky subordination lies the German strength, and in the studied ignoring of the claims of the unit we are to read the sense of citizenship. In England every man's house is, and must remain, his castle, where he may practise any abomination he pleases, even child torture, so long as screams are not heard outside, and thus warrant an officer of the S.P.C.C. in entering. The roadway is also free to all, and the soil and the gravel which is on it, witness the following illustration. I lived, when in London, on a hill that is the curse of horses in the winter months. A reluctant vestry, much plagued of its more philanthropic represen- tatives, was at last persuaded to dump down some sand in the slipperiest places for the use of con- CH. i] HOW ONE BECOMES AN ALIEN 7 siderate carters. A German vestry would do this as a matter of course. And no German child would be so lost to all civic feeling as to make these heaps of sand into a jumping ground. In England it was beaten in throughout the whole day by hundreds of little feet, and trodden into a hard, unmalleable crust, so that the waggoners in their need were too lazy to break it up to scatter under the labouring hoofs of their horses. Besides, they had no spades. They would have spades in Germany, and no German policeman would in the first instance have allowed children to make havoc of these heaps in Germany. Germans seem to me to think of everything, to know everything collectively, and yet to trust no single person, individually, to do either. On the front of every post-box these Allwissend warn them- selves to look carefully, before posting a letter, to see whether it bears a stamp or not, and whether the sender has even omitted to put the address. A wait in one of the tiniest of station waiting-rooms represents amusement, coupled with instruction. You can learn your duties as a travelling showman, also how many live lions you are allowed to travel with to a given spot. Do many people want to travel with dead ones ? You may learn that it is forbidden to give theatrical performances at all in a waiting-room, place bicycles on the refreshment- room tables, or carry trees across the line. The German character reminds me of the brown- bread ice, once fashionable as a ball supper refresh- ment. Poetry and prose are in it most oddly commingled. The romantic side of my own nature seems to me to derive from and to have been fed by an 8 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. i early and concentrated study of the great " Kinder- und Hausmarchen" of the brothers Grimm. I remember the winter's evening when the book was first brought into our nursery, the leaping firelight, the strange patterns made by the high nursery fender on the ceiling, the proud, pleased face of Milly. . . . The first story that was read to us out of that ugly red and gold and blue volume published by Edmund Routledge, was " The Woodcutter's Child." And from that moment, "Jack the Giant Killer," even " Beauty and the Beast," were forgotten ; savage, unromantic, incomplete, they now seemed. On the second night we read the weirdest story of all not a child's story by any means. " Oh, if I could but shiver !" It was horrible, grotesque, up to the final incident, when the beautiful high-born Princess pours the pailful of little fishes down the naked back of the man who shivered then, and not till then. Yet we children found romance in it; found dim, unearthly terrors, that made us fall silent and our eyes grow round, so that after that night the story was tabooed by our elders, who would never consent to read it aloud to us again. Milly herself said it was vulgar. As one grew older, one was promoted to the study of the more actual, legendary contes of the " Deutsche Sagen." This, the second collection of the brothers Grimm, concerns itself more with certain semi-historical per- sonages, Graf this, Count that, who, when at home, and, as one might say, thoroughly domesticated, represent really that superior thief, called in German CH. i] HOW ONE BECOMES AN ALIEN 9 legend the " Robber Baron." It is really he, who, twice a day, is in the habit of descending from his Schloss on the steep to rob the merchant, whom he is able to perceive from his fastness, travelling timorously along the valley below. It is also he who, on pleasure bent, not business, descends to hunt, to fish, to flirt with the Nixes of the stream, or with some snaky Melusine or Lady of the Foun- tain. Great families, so Grimm says, have sprung from such alliances. Grimm tells us also of the humble sort of Nix, who goes to market, fondly hoping to pass her pretty self off for a proper German Mddchen. She is, alas ! soon recognized by the water that drips from the corner of her apron. The Church, the Schloss, the Stream, the little self- contained Dorf, with its houses drawn up close for company, figure in all the tales. And so do the deep, dark, puzzling woods that lie so near, into which children may stray, and whence wild beasts issue, of which nothing is known and all is feared. I have never seen woods like those of Germany, where one hears the screech of the wild cat in the daytime as the light grows lower, where the very toadstools have an unnatural colour, and the fairy plant clusters on every bough. Do not Jorinde and Joringel still wander there, looking for fern seed, and does not the crooked, twisted witch, jealous of so much happiness, lurk and peer, desirous to turn each young lover into a bird and add him, then and there, to the collection of birds of all sorts in cages that fill her cottage. The value of birds in Germany is made apparent in nearly every story. They say that one reason why Germans more or io THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. i less detest the French, is because that fervently gastronomic nation prefers little birds simmering in the pot to little birds singing in cages. And that is also why there are so few cats in Germany. I have seen them now, those woods, those streams, those castles that I used, as a little child, to read about carried away, entranced sitting in the hard window-seat, overlooking a stony, regular London street. And I was quite ready for that summer morning about seven when, rising from my berth, uncalled, alone, I leapt to the little window of my cabin on the Rhine boat, and saw, in the golden morning light, a panorama slowly passing before my eyes, that beggared my English dreams of Thames and Ouse. It seemed as if this wonderful sight, like a picture hung on a wall in a lonely gallery, had waited, calm, indifferent, careless of its effect, through all the years, for the unexpectant eyes of me and my like to rest upon. It was one long, fair procession of castled heights, each tipped with its little heap of broken stones that had once meant so much, clad with soft foliage masking the proud decay underneath ; as it were a cloak of green mantling the ragged fireplaces and deficient corner- stones of the broken robber stronghold. The chari- table green led the eye of the beholder gently away and down to the edge of the water that ran along evenly, its great, dark, dull flow delving into the scarped banks, with light ripples breaking up the darkness near the middle, whereon I was borne slowly along in my quiet, sleeping boat. Nobody minded, nobody seemed to wake but I ; we were all on our way to Mainz, on business or CH. i] HOW ONE BECOMES AN ALIEN u pleasure intent; we were all Germans, the proud possessors of this unique waterway. Yet to one so recently enrolled in these civic benefits as I, it was a sight for tears, in its gentle, passionless dignity, this view that was vouchsafed me out of my little square port-hole straight on to romance. For the Rhine is surely the most romantic thing in the world. The Rhine has every- thing. It is wide, it has cliffs on both sides like a cafton, and it is so deep, so dreadfully, awfully, deep all the time. And there are holes, deeper still, that are the dungeons of the Lorelei. The full broad smile of its treacherous shallows masks them ; little innocent ripples only betray the death that attends the lure of a sweet song wafted over the water. And though the authorities have, for utili- tarian purposes, blasted away the foot of her rock, the Lorelei is still there, and Germans know it well, for Heine's lyric enshrined her in the German con- sciousness for ever. Hats go off as we pass the jutting promontory whence, by her voice, she once charmed the hapless fisherman to his doom, and if, in these modern days, she no longer sings her song for herself, it is sung for her, in full and lusty, yet soft chorale, by the sons and daughters of Heine's Germany. We fare on. The great cliffs on both sides of the stream, with their full rows of vines crawling up to the summit, are hung before our eyes like an oppres- sive dream curtain. Right back, on the tops of the hills, out of our sight who drift on the stream below, stretch the woods of the Eiffel, one of the great silent forests of Germany. Horribly, deadly still they are, 12 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. i devoid of the prattle of birds, undisturbed in their sinister peace the whole day long, except for the rustle of the innocent deer and the more violent crash of the wild boars plunging through the thickets on their way to drink. " The woods," says Joseph Leopold, " are silent because there are hardly any birds." Another reason for the value set on them ; there is not enough water for these little creatures of which Germans are so passionately fond, and it is a long way to fly down to the Rhine for every mouthful of moisture. Yes, a bird is a creature round which the popular imagination readily fastens. Back, back, they stretch, these terrible, mysterious, unblest wildernesses. Terrible, for all the beasts of legend may and do lurk in their secret recesses, and the stalwart forester,* in his lovely green and grey * This official, who may be royal-imperial, royal, princely, or merely the officer of a private domain as who should say a private policeman leads at times a life of sufficient danger, though witches may be absent from the vast tracts of forest over which he rules. The German poacher and the German wood thief, who will chop down and carry off in a night from one to ten fir-trees or half as many wild boars or fallow deer, is a person far more bloodthirsty and determined than any of his confreres of the English woodlands, even near the large manufacturing towns. It is a pretty comment upon the predi- lection displayed by our author, in common with every other writer upon German characteristics for enlarging on the orderli- ness and respect for law that she imagines herself to perceive in the German nation, that the percentage of crimes of violence is higher than that of any other country in the world, with the sole exception of the United States ; that Germany is the most heavily policed nation in the world ; that forty per cent, of the crimes of violence are committed against policemen, foresters, postmen who are robbed and murdered in the solitary and romantic woodlands with a lamentable frequency and, by an odd colloca- CH. i] HOW ONE BECOMES AN ALIEN 13 uniform, with his distant air of undefined yet limit- less authority, is king. Whom and what does he not govern ? Beasts, of course; and who knows what undisciplined humanity, what savage robbers, and ladies like Schinderhannes, their picturesque accomplice, he may not meet in his day-long wanderings ? In this silence, this sameness and vastness, one has a feeling that anything, everything, might happen, and that the mild blue-eyed wood- cutters and charcoal-burners, of whom you may meet a sample or two in the course of a long day's walk, may have grown strangely morbid in this perverting solitude, and be disposed to make a bad use of their unsermoned liberty. And the great, populous, indifferent, waterway glides though these secret and potential mysteries, majestically ignoring all save what comes to meet it ; the wild, thirsty creatures that brush and trample down to the bank for water, the staple of their life. But the stream has nothing to do with the back- tion of psychology, against firemen. The fireman in Germany is almost as detested as the policeman ; I can only imagine because he is a State official, wearing a uniform. When a village near St. Goarshausen was being burned to the ground, I saw the peasant inhabitants turn out in a body and stone the firemen that came galloping up along the Rhine. It was true that this was attri- butable rather to a desire to collect the insurance money than to any immediate dislike of the firemen, but such a proceeding cannot be held to argue any strong respect for either law or order. The fact is that every non-official German detests or despises every German official in so far as his office is concerned of course in varying degrees. He abides by laws and regulations because he will be fined with unerring swiftness or imprisoned after a trial of excruciating slowness, if he breaks the one or neglects the other. He is, in fact, not so much law-abiding as kept under by laws. J. L. F. M. H. 14 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. i woods; it threads languidly the countries of enchant- ment, avoiding, as it were, the thought and oppres- sion of them. It must pass on its way to the noisy towns of commerce beyond, through this Valley of Apollyon, this sinister passage commanded by the two portals the rock of the Drachenfels on the one side, and Rolandseck on the other. Entering here, it passes for a space out of the modern world. Even the railway, running continually like a covert insult under either bank, hardly hints modernity ; it cannot seriously affect a flow so big, so black, so simple, and so deep down in its bed. The strong, sane, morning light only seems to touch the crests of the mountain walls that enclose that river-bed, these vast mounds of closely-packed leaves, tipped with castles, that hang over it. Old, grey, helpless, and forlorn, the banks look under the glare of the truculent, virile shafts of gold that are fostering and ripening the vine screens minute by minute. And at night we wandered along the white, ghostly, vine-bordered road by Assmanshausen, desiring deeply to see the fox, whose smell be- wrayeth him, actually at his thievish work among the vines. . . . The trains rushing along under the opposite bank looked like worms, the worm of legend, or like rattlesnakes with tails of gold. One is almost glad when they have passed, and once more all is quiet, and the ripple of the Rhine assumes again its own predominance, and the black bank scoops in as before. It is not for very long. There is a line on both sides of the Rhine ; and very soon, on the side where one is walking, one is confronted by a dusky mass that seems to have a kind of life, advancing CH. i] HOW ONE BECOMES AN ALIEN 15 with its bulldog breast and body of lighted carriages. It, too, passes, rattling by complacently ; and the scent of the fox, that has surely lain there on this patch of grass by the roadside all night, comes out strongly again. . . . And so, after three lazy days of sun and wind and soothing ripple, I go gliding into the country of my adoption, insinuating myself by these peaceful methods of penetration. I am borne past Boppard, where sundry squares of linen are waved by charm- ing relations out of villa windows to welcome the desirable alien. At Rens, with its terrace and ruined tower, where a holy Roman Emperor once met his lieges, more charming German relations ! I get off the boat there for a moment, and walk straight into the village Kermesse, now in full swing, and I am heartily invited to dance by a handsome compatriot in full costume. But these few alightings on German soil are the merest taking of seizin. During these five days or so I am at home, not in Germany, but upon the steamer. I sleep on it, I eat on it, I travel on it, and it is only during the halts to take in cargo that I walk upon the banks. So that into Germany I have only made as yet the merest swallow flights, returning to the safe shelter of England. For a ship is always English at least, that is the impres- sion that I have, though this particular ship happens to be Dutch. Still, it isn't German, and its cooking is as bad as anything that could be found in England. In the circumstances of my adieu of my native land this fact seems to be consoling and protective. At Assmanshausen there are a great many hotels. 16 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. i The sun is setting ; the vineyards up the steep hills are blood-red. And when I step off here it is all over with me. For here upon the bank there stand the nearest relations of all. They are going to induct me into the sacred and mysterious rites of German citizenship. And don't they do it ! For they conduct the literary lady to the Literary Hotel, advertised as such. Before I may sit down to eat Rhine salmon and drink Rhine wine I must visit the Freiligrath Room. An omission on my part to gaze, fasting, on the apartment where one of Germany's lyric poets stayed several summers, and drank, let us say, nine hundred bottles of Rhine wine, would be a sign of the grossest disrespect, unpermissible even in a tired alien. What poet in England could draw us to his room before we have washed the stain of travel from us, and before we have dined? But this is the bank of the Rhine. This is Germany. And as I sit upon the hotel balcony and look out at the silver expanse of the stream, the lights upon the farther bank, the deep purple of the high woods, and the thin paring of a new moon that seems, since I did not happen to see it first through the glass of any window, to offer me the good luck of Germany, suddenly it comes into my head that when, after a little travel- ling across this broad land, I again set foot upon the gangway of a ship, and when I am asked, "Are you a British subject?" I shall have to answer " No," because I have tasted of these grapes, drunk of this wine, and heard the flow of this of the river. When I return to my native land I shall be an I trust desirable alien. CHAPTER II HAREM SKIRTS, STORKS, AND SOME SOCIAL AMENITIES THE Rhine is all very well, but the Rhine is the heritage of all the nations. I had said to Joseph Leopold that I could never feel truly German until I had lived positively lived watched him pay rates and taxes in a German town with no topographical features or historical associations of any sort where- with to attract tourists, and had lived in a house taken in our own name, where there should be, moreover, a correct family of storks domiciled on the roof. So accordingly, one night in May, I crossed back from England, where I had had business, and towards the evening of the second day alighted on the platform of no particular town in the Grand Duchy of Hessen-Darmstadt, where Joseph Leopold and his mother, already settled in the house where the stork as I hoped was also settled, were wait- ing to receive me. I had spent a night in Cologne, in a very gorgeous hotel that was not so very dear. It is difficult to take much interest in Cologne, it is so emphatically only a place to kick off from, a place where you take the train to the interior, buy Tauchnitz volumes and go to see the Dom, that triumph of steeplejacks. I 17 2 i8 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. 11 had done a little more. After paying my respects at the Post Office, which is like a palace, I went all round the city in a tram. And I was taken to the theatre in the evening to see a musical comedy in the most beautiful drawing-room that ever called itself a theatre, and was quite cheap. Next morning I got into my train, and it was like any other railway journey, only I was sitting in an exquisitely-groomed railway-carriage fitted with all sorts of sensible, comfort-loving apparatus, pro- vided for a sensible, comfort-loving people. If I had wished it, the art nouveau dun-velvet-coloured seats would have pulled out to make me a bed. In the lavatory, I found I could have a cake of good soap and a clean towel to wash and dry my hands. The company demanded merely the slight expendi- ture of energy on my part which would be involved in the insertion often pfennigs in the slot-machine. I did so, and according to promise, the obliging machine politely flung the soap and a clean towel into my face. This was for the body ; my mental peace was attended to as well. In the corridor, right opposite my eyes, was a glass-walled cupboard, containing, plain to see, a pick and an axe. Supposing an accident should occur, and my centre of gravity and that of the compartment I was in came to be inverted, all I had to do was to break the glass, take out the pick, and hew myself out. The most nervous traveller might rest tranquil, and survey in peace the ordinary sights of a railway-line until he should fall asleep. And there was little except this extreme of comfort inside, and the queer legends CH. 11] HAREM SKIRTS 19 inscribed on waggons grotesque abbreviations of words not realized, like Tragf- , and Bodenfl- , and a more lugubrious collection of letters, Ladengew that kept me puzzling till the dusk came and merged everything into the same dreary dream of travel, to tell me that I was not journeying along quietly under the evening star in England. H is a junction, so the station is large and imposing for a very moderate-sized town. It looked homely in parts, palatial in others, cheerful every- where. As I got stiffly out of the carriage and was led by Joseph Leopold and his mother into the big hall of the Bahnhof, I saw that its roof was frescoed with an overarching trellis of flowers wild flowers, producing very much the same effect as the roof of Boxgrove Priory Church in England. The electric light hung in elegant festoons of pearly globes strung on long cords, like organ-pipes of different calibres. I was tired, and I was hustled into a cab, or I should have peeped into a first-class waiting- room, and perhaps into a second-class waiting-room f both decorated in the most excellent taste, both with the same flower-painted ceilings and wreathed pillars, the only apparent difference between first and second class being in the varieties of flowers selected for adornment. If I had had to be fed, instead of waiting till I got home, I should have been given a cheap meal that would not have dis- graced the Carlton, the cheapness only being taken out in the quantity. A real chef presides over most of the station restaurants in Germany, and even the railway sandwiches the lacks, or ham sausage sand- wiches you snatch in a hurry are a dream. But if 20 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. n you have time to sit down you eat a carefully prepared meal in a decent sort of quiet hall that is, above all, soothing. Large artificial roses in pots raise their delicate sprays above the welter of hats and coats, instead of the scraggy palms that always seem to have a pointed leaf ready to hit you in the eye, and are silhouetted on dark wine-red panelling instead of being repeated in fly-blown gilt mirrors. And while you are waiting you need be under no anxiety as to the starting of your train. An electric clock serves a large enamelled time-table on the wall, and you are aware of its rapid subtle change by the unobtrusive click that occurs at intervals over your head. Besides this, an individual in gorgeous garments, with the presence of a high- class butler in an English family of rank and a voice to match, flings open the restaurant doors every now and then, and announces the fact to you that in five minutes or so you may begin to pay your bill, and gather your odds and ends and go out into the business section to find the train for Cassel, for Kirchain or for Frankfurt, as the case may be, waiting for you. I was taken past the two officials in blue, gold- laced coats who stand on each side of a turnstile furnished with a penny-in-the-slot machine. Both Joseph Leopold and his mother had had to furnish themselves with these penny passes before they could get on to the platform to welcome me. And, significant fact, all residents non-travellers, anxious to avail themselves daily of the really superior cuisine of the Bahnhofhave also always to pass through this turnstile. CH. n] HAREM SKIRTS 21 Supper was waiting for me at home in the house where I confidently expected to find the nest of storks which were to represent Germany for me. The night was very dark, and after driving for some time in streets of villas which reminded me of St. John's Wood or Addison Road, we came to a tall building with scaffold-poles girt about it, looking ghostly in the lamplight. " This is our house," Joseph Leopold remarked. " It is new very new too new." He looked anxiously at me. I looked up into the dim empyrean. It did not seem as if a nest of storks would find that high- pitched roof an easy platform whereon to bring up a large family; but I was patient, ate my supper quietly, and decided to ask for sight of Germany's most prominent feature next morning. But next morning I saw very plainly why Joseph Leopold had looked nervous. The house, though replete with every modern comfort, did not boast this delightful parasitical growth, and I was told that I should have to take a walk and visit, perhaps, the old part of H before I saw the German substitute for the homely cabbage which ushers English babies into the world. In my first walk, however, I saw one. I saw two. Going towards Wieseck, a village suburb of H , along the straight, cheerless, treeless road, my eyes lingered on the adjacent moorland, where the Hunnen- graber are the graves of buried people who lived before the dawn of all we know. Low, stagnant pools,* There is nothing like a stagnant pool between the city of H and the village of Wieseck. There are excellently fertile 22 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. n fringed by gloomy belts of trees, of dark, despondent grass, stretched away under a drooping sky, and presently two great birds topped the trees and came sailing towards us across the marshland. They made a strong note of tossing black and white in the sullen greyness, and something majestic in their flight, as of long legs folded and trailing after, struck me, and I said : " These are the storks I have come so far to see." "They are, indeed," Joseph Leopold said. " They come out of that wood.* They are the parent-birds, and have been seeking food ; their nest is probably on the roof of one of those houses. Let us watch and see where they go." They flew straight for the twisted, crooked-tiled roof of a house near by. It was the village inn. They settled and stayed there; I could just make out their unwieldy forms nestled under a high red chimney-stack. And we went on and surveyed the village, too, an old place that stood there long before the modern industrial suburb, which is now the city of H , while Wieseck, the old nodus, has fallen to the rank of a village in the outskirts. The inn was quite comfortable and modernized inside. Extremes meet in Germany, and the roof that shelters the stork is also wired for electric light. The telephone-bell rings in the Weinstube, where bloused peasants sit and spill their wine on green plains, owned by peasant proprietors, and scientifically irrigated with running water. J. L. F. M. H. Storks never come out of woods. They never go into them. J. L. F. M. H. CH. n] HAREM SKIRTS 23 the trestled table, and men who never have worn evening-dress except at a wedding or a civic cere- mony, and whose wives would think it shame to go decolletee, read the works of John Galsworthy and H. G. Wells. So I found when I began to return and pay calls. One of the first questions that Mutterchen, on my arrival, had asked me was : " Have you got it with you ?" She meant my harem skirt, that Joseph Leopold had begged me to buy and bring. The harem skirt was a beautiful outdoors fashion, killed by too zealous advertising. Enterprising advertising agents suddenly let loose a whole troop of lovely women to do a goose-step in the gutters of London Town and Paris Town wearing a costume as sensible as it is beautiful, and short-sightedly welcomed the emeute thus caused. For when their object of mild advertisement was gained, they were unable to say to the sea of comment and criticism whose onset they had provoked: "Thus far and no farther!" They overshot the mark; the police found them- selves interfered with in their functions ; and the harem skirt is now dead as a door-nail. It is no longer outre ; it is worse it is old-fashioned. The papers allude to it as " meteoric." And yet it was a mode that fashion should not willingly have let die. As a walking costume it was ideal ; and short, stumpy women, who do not look well in short, round skirts, should have cloven to it. It was length without breadth, heroism without risk, a long garment that needed no holding up, and did not flop and collect round the ankles. 24 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. n Soon after my arrival in H , to please Joseph Leopold and his mother, I put it on, and went forth to pay a call. No, it was not a real call real calls in Germany are paid between the hours of twelve and one or five and seven it was going out to tea in a friendly way. I had promised to show Frau Rechtsanwalt B and her husband the famous Hosen-rock, of which they had heard so much, actually in wear. These dear people were all agog to see it. They had seen representations of it in the illustrated papers, and read of it in the accounts of police-court trials for disturbances ; but they had not seen it, as I have, travestied on the cinematograph, for the very simple reason that respectable German people of a certain class do not patronize the cinematograph. The Herr Rechtsanwalt was going to get away early from business to see it. A Prussian Major whom I had seen in uniform posturing about the town on a fat white Schimmel, was coming to tea to see it. And Joseph Leopold and his mother were coming to chaperone it. The Frau Rechtsanwalt B lived just across the street and a little way along past the barber's and the boot shop, in a distracting new white flat with overhanging balconies. Joseph Leopold and his mother walked one on either side of me appre- hendingly, but not insultingly, near. I got across alive. I flattered myself that my quiet, unnoticeable dark blue serge banner-like flaps, covering the innocentest of dark blue silk trousers, representing as they did the subtlest pos- sible evading of the necessary bifurcation, would pass as the ordinary skimped skirt of the year. By CH. n] HAREM SKIRTS 25 the way, I thought scornfully, remembering the stampedes I had seen some few months ago in Eng- land, what a fuss to make about a woman putting each leg into a separate trouser, when the present accepted fashion is tantamount to her getting both legs into one ! I went across, walking with an ease and freedom I have never known in any other costume, and up Frau B 's easy, broad oak, uncarpeted staircase, and quite unabashed for there is really nothing in it but a woman walking as comfortably and un- obtrusively as a man for the first time in her life into this German drawing-room, with the tea spread in the dining-room, on which the wide folding-doors were thrown open. I saw that it was going to be what one remembers as an old-fashioned English sit-down tea not a "stout" tea, for there was nothing on the table but the ordinary give-and-take of thin tea, with cake and bread-and-butter handed round in cake-stands. But we all sat down, and I seem to remember that we had dainty napkins. "It's nothing!" my hostess declared, when the first shock was over and cake handed. " I shouldn't have known unless you had told me beforehand." Her husband was silent : he was a lawyer, and might possibly have seen me crossing the street. He probably already saw the police of his native town politely requesting me to desist from giving the natives of H food for reflection. And so, indeed, it proved. The Prussian officer, a man of few words literally of few words, for I have now known him long, both in Germany and England, and I have never heard 26 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. :i him say anything but softly, huskily, seductively, on first meeting you, " Wie geht's Ihnen?" the Prussian officer sat at my side, and at intervals murmured sweetly, more to himself than to me, " Hosen-rock /" He reminded me of Coquelin in " L'Indecis," murmuring the name of the beloved : " C'est comme du sucre dans la bouche." And all the while, as far as was consistent with the recurrent effort to be polite in Germany, and accept cake and pass cake in that almost unknown language appalling at first but later a matter which it seems to me can be settled fairly adequately by sprinkling one's conversation with civil expletives and flinging "Bittes /" about freely I was allowing my eyes to wander about the room, and wondering why, though it looked different, it yet looked like "somewhere" in England. And at last I decided that it reminded me of a tea-party that I once went to in Birmingham with some relations who had a suggestion of Quakerdom about them. It was the furniture, the self-embroidered hangings, the saddle- bag chairs, interspersed with cane or wicker ones, the pictures on the wall that looked like chromo- lithographs (I daren't say that for a fact, but I think they were).* And had I come all the way into Hessia to look at Landseer's " Deer at Bay "? Or the mantel borders, fringing adequately the wood and glass affair, looking like a model of a new church that was erected over the fireplace, and the art plates, transfixed, pilloried on the walls, painted with portraits of members of the hostess's family * They were really oil-paintings, also from the hand of the accomplished hostess. J. L. F. M. H. CH. n] SOME SOCIAL AMENITIES 27 by the hostess herself? And my hostess was what would be called a notable woman in England, because she managed her house admirably, and did so many other things besides. In Germany she was just ordinary. Her very blouse was embroidered hieratically, wherever embroidery would lie, by her own fair hands. I found myself staring covertly at the strange mythological figures, complicated and inter- woven with what antiquaries describe as the Gothic worm twist, that had been pressed into the service of decorating the bosom of this dear little Hausfrau. Germans are still, in matters of decoration, wallowing in the " aesthetic " craze the strange modification of pre-Raphaelitism which insinuated itself into the middle-class consciousness and on to the walls and decorations of their houses under the unconscious impetus of Oscar Wilde. And methinks that practicality and aestheticism make an odd mixture. The master of the house, with his fine head and sensitive, intelligent mouth, was very like some early portraits of Napoleon. Paying to my unusual costume polite French compliments, he began to talk of Shakespeare and the musical glasses. This is no old-fashioned figure of speech ; he betrayed a closer acquaintance with Shakespeare than either Joseph Leopold or I could boast, while Oscar Strauss' " Salome," so long interdicted in England, was not much more than food for babes to him. H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, etc., were house- hold names to this instructed person ; he was up in their latest works. Where in Birmingham or Salford should I have met with this? I listened. I told 28 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. n him that I personally had had the pleasure of the acquaintance of both these godlike personages. He beamed ingenuously, and, unlike Birmingham or Salford, was not in the least concerned to glean from me personal details of the households and manners and customs of great English authors.* To him they were as recondite, as undiscoverable, as Shakespeare, but as potent factors of the intel- lectual, existence of their day as Shakespeare was in his. He needed no details of the private lives of these gentlemen to feed his interest in their work. And the soft murmur of " Hosen-rock " went on. ... Frau B made fresh tea with meticulous pre- cision . . . while I no longer felt as if I were in Colmore Row, Birmingham, and was quite sure that Herr B was not responsible for the painted plates. But I expect I was wrong : I have realized by now that hand-painted plates and real culture can live side by side in Germany. I say " culture " advisedly, for I consider culture, so-called, to be only education-deep, and in no way instinctive. At least, I am sure it may be so in Hessen-Darmstadt. My host was educated ; he had, moreover, a keen, an open, mind. He could take in ideas, he could play with them, but he could not, so far as I could see, originate them. It is a far cry from that solid, well-organized, well-engineered mind of his, a mind like a carefully planned house, properly architected This, of course, is very un-German, since the average German will read with avidity any details of the life of either Goethe or Shakespeare, and comparatively neglect the poetry of either writer. But even in Sodom there may have been one just man. J. L. F. M. H. CH. 11] SOME SOCIAL AMENITIES 29 from the first plan on paper, as it were, arranged up-to-date and for the future with every modern convenience, plus the powers of expansion necessary for the introduction of new inventions it is a far cry, I think, to the tricksy, moody genius of the Englishman, or to the alert, erratic, passion-driven one of the Frenchman. I think the Latin mind is like an empty, old, built-on-to house or castle, ruined in parts, decorated art nouveau in the rest a house in whose corridors you never know whom you may meet, whether a ghost or an apache, a ci-devant or a socialist ? CHAPTER III SLEEPY HOLLOW I THINK that if one seriously considers, as I have done, the relative genius for domesticity of the three nations France, Germany, and England one is bound to place France first and England last. My readers will certainly think that I am preparing a laboured epigram, but no, I am deeply serious. In the land of my birth the sloppy opinion prevails that the English home is the focus of all domestic virtues, that the Englishman's castle, containing the Englishman's fireside, is inexpugnable. Granted England's pre-eminence in the art of le foyer, it is then grudgingly admitted that Germany comes in a good second. But France, the country of res- taurants and long collages and Christmas spent in the streets as among booths and merry-go-rounds at a fair, is supposed to be absolutely innocent of any domestic fibre at all. I, who speak, have been one way and another considerably " at home " in the family circles of members of all three nations. I know the free whisky and " Come in after dinner " of England well enough ; the " after " does not spell reserve so much as meanness. And whereas the real German Haus- 30 CH. in] SLEEPY HOLLOW 31 frau does now and then permit people to " drop in," I have only once known a chance visitor admitted into the French family circle, even after dinner. Relations, of course, crop up insufferably enough at all times in France, mostly into one's bedroom, but relations only prove my contention. In England, as we all know, even relations do not invade the Englishman's fireside with impunity ; the English- man, besides, is more or less safe from this form of intrusion, for he is, as a rule, on quite bad terms with at least two-thirds of his relations, and does not acknowledge, or candidly ignores, the other third. I have seen an Englishman pass his own first cousin in the street, not because he had any grounds of quarrel with him, but simply because he did not know him. And when pressed, he lazily explained that through some quite usual circumstance, their ways of life lay apart. 1 have myself been introduced, at a London dinner party, to a brilliant and popular male cousin, who had been deputed to take me in to dinner. My hostess was simply, in the hurry and bustle of a London life, unaware of the relationship. Why should she know ? She had never met this relation of mine at my house. But she was, of course, quite au fait of the people she was in the habit of asking to her dinners ; she knew that I was neither Scot nor Jew, and could be counted upon, therefore, to be easy about family ties. My new- found cousin took me in, and we chatted pleasantly through our allotted span of intercourse, and parted quite good acquaintances. But I have never seen him since ; I did not want to ; neither, I suppose, did he care to carry on his acquaintance with me. We 32 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. in were both busy and undomestic people, that is to say, of English extraction, both of us. As I said, in England, in Mayfair, it provoked no comment whatever. But if such a thing could happen in Germany, it would be considered at least a romantic or even disagreeable incident there would be a suggestion of " some story behind." In France it certainly could not happen at all. No French hostess would have run her head into a noose ; she would, before asking me to her house, have made it her business to learn which of my relations I was on good or bad terms with. She would be quite sure that I could not in the nature of things have been, as in the case I have just men- tioned, on no terms at all. For instance, once in Paris, at an evening party at the house of Madame Taine, the widow of the historian, I was presented to an old, be-diamonded Vicomtesse bearing a well- known and honoured name of the Faubourg St. Germain. I was not thrown at her head, irrespec- tive of consequences, just because I happened to be the nearest person to the seat where she was sitting ; oh no, there was some social reason for my introduction. But I was first of all solemnly warned that this old lady was not on terms with her daughter-in-law, another Vicomtesse of a well- known name. This was as well, as the daughter- in-law had been, in her green youth spent in England, a school companion of mine. Of course, Madame Taine could not have been expected to know that, but she took no risks and cleverly saved the situation in advance. This was in cosmopolitan Paris. CH. in] SLEEPY HOLLOW 33 In the provinces well, let me say, speaking as one who has sounded the very depths of French provincial life, a la Balzac, that no one who has not done so can have the very slightest idea what it is like. You may think of the dulness, the impenetrability of it all, as you think of the primeval forests of the Amazon, described by Joseph Conrad and more recently by H. M. Tomlinson. Only it is a forest of undistinguished people, as like in the main as one ombu tree or one branch of liana to another. There is a waterway through these family trees as there is through the forest depths of the Amazon ; you are perhaps staying at one clearing, and you take a car and drive to visit some settlers at another. You get out of the car, you march up the well-raked-over carriage-drive leading to the house, and ascend the four or five well-tended steps, and are introduced into the salon. You have no idea as you go in how many families, each with separate interests, are going to be congregated on the floor of that salon. There it is, the family, or families, " sitting up " on its ugly, stiff chairs Monsieur, home from business ; he begins work so much earlier than his English confrere that he is well home by the early afternoon grandmere, perhaps, and surely a belle- mere or two. Then the belle-fille, bored and incom- prise, with all the household cares taken off her shoulders so that she may the better emotionally attend to her children. Then there is the engaged couple there is pretty sure to be one engaged couple or more and even the engaged couple must 3 34 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. m sit, intensely chaperoned, in the common sitting- room, must take a part in the feeble, banal conversa- tion that manners prescribe when strangers invade the sanctity of the home. These people are undoubtedly educated, they are often clever, they may even be original, but amid this terrible massing of communal interests, what individual could let him or herself go to the extent of demonstrating that cleverness or originality ? It would be too communally dangerous. Each member of the junta listens to the other, and as elsewhere, least said soonest mended. Another feature of this intense domesticity is that the visitor has no means of distinguishing the parentage of all the check-bloused and bare-legged and yellow- booted children, until the usual incident of play occurs, and the baby with the pin that is running into it, or the boy who has been gifle by the girl, runs stormily crying to its own mother to be as stormily comforted. Now, as to that small point, I have never seen a German baby cry like an English or French baby, or seen a German mother let herself go in the same hysterical way. A German Mutterchen, one is almost tempted to think, is not addicted to the slightly selfish Latin passion for her own child. There always seems something rather communal about the maternal attitude towards the Kinder. And German children are not so universally present ; I suspect the reason is that although they are not so hysterical or naughty they are rougher, more like little animals less presentable, in fact. You rarely see the children if you go to pay a stiffish CH. in] SLEEPY HOLLOW 35 call in Germany. You see the person you have asked to see and perhaps no one else, just as you do in England. They give you tea just as they do in England ; the fact that it is a sit-down tea does not stultify and make it formal, since the eatables are of the lightest and airiest description, and uncompli- cated by the tedious demands of ravenous little children. And the conversation that accompanies the meal, if inclined in the provinces to be heavy and unillumined, is still conversation, the exchange of ideas and individuals may and do assert them- selves in argument. You pay your more formal calls in the morning and you stay just twenty minutes, keeping your card-case in your hand. You are stiff yourself as you know how to be, and that is not very stiff, and then I suppose the worst of that is they think you are an amiable lunatic. On the other hand, when it is your turn to " sit up " and receive calls, you think, if you have not been properly drilled and informed, that the people are exceedingly frigid and disagreeable. I could not think why Mutterchen, who naturally knew the ropes a good deal better than her daughter- in-law, seemed so well pleased with the visit of the Herr Professor and Frau Professorin C.,*who came one sunshiny morning to pay me a formal call. They sat on the very edge of the settee and talked to Mutterchen, who speaks quite good German. I sat beside her, keeping my needlework in my hand, which I afterwards found I ought not to have done, * It was really a " Wirklicher Geheimer Regierungs Rath " and his wife, a "Geborene Freifrau von O " (J. L. F. M. H.). 36 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. m and tried valiantly to add airy ungrammatical nothings to the very vapid conversation that was being held in my honour. That was the point. Yet nobody took up a word I said, except Mutterchen, who seemed all the time on thorns, and to be trying politely to bring me into the conversation, bad grammar, halting sentences and all. After a session of exactly twenty minutes the pair rose, with a handshake of the stiffest to Mutterchen, and a curt nod to me, the lady of the house. I was boiling with rage, and said to Joseph Leopold : " If this is the way the Fatherland welcomes alien brides, I think 1 could have dispensed with the visit of the greatest gun in K , as you say he is. Why, the wife snubbed me to death ! She hardly threw me a word. ..." Very slowly Joseph Leopold removed his pipe from his mouth. " They took you for my mother's companion," he said, " and a very cheeky one at that putting your word in every now and then, and going on with your sewing 1" That was a mistake; but the whole lamentable incident was Joseph Leopold's fault, for confusing Mutterchen and me in his introduction. Of course Mutterchen looks ridiculously young. . . . In the afternoon I went to tea with Frau L , and relieved my mind by telling her in bad German all that had befallen me on the occasion of the first visit that had been paid me. I ought to have put myself forward, she said, and put my work away. I had looked too humble. Frau L had been in England, and she realize show different things are there. CH. in] SLEEPY HOLLOW 37 Then, when the mistake was cleared up, I was asked to a formal Kaffee Klatch. This is a tea-party in England a five o'clock only in Germany it is always at four, and the guests are expected and endeavour to be punctual to the minute. It lasts till seven, and people bring their work. I have attended such parties both in Germany and in Belgium. The ceremonial is very much alike in both countries. I will not attempt to describe one item of the polite procedure, for in every book about Germany you meet a description of that business of the favoured guest and the Sofa Platz. My mother impressed on me, when my marriage first took me to Germany (she had been an old resident in my new country), that whatever else I did when I first began to " go out " there was one unpardonable sin, and that was to take Sofa Platz uninvited. However, as a bride, the phrase " Bitte, meine Frau, wollen Sie Sofa Platz nehmen ?" sounded pretty frequently in my ears. The rest of the proceedings surely cannot have altered much since 1860, when my mother cultivated German society at Diisseldorf. In the first place, no men attend as in England, but, unlike England, men are not expected to attend, and are not complained of at every future occasion. There are no tea-cups to be seen in the drawing-room ; but what I should have called a nursery tea, a stout tea, a thick tea, is set out in the dining-room, on long tables covered with spotless white table-cloths. The table centre has generally been embroidered or put together by the hostess, in some cases very much as a bird's-nest is put together, of the most hetero- geneous materials, and it is proper to admire it. The 38 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. m pieces de resistance are one or more great open Torte, pasty crusts filled with fruit and jam and Schlagzahn whipped cream. The white-aproned maids run about handing cups of tea and coffee, poured out by the hostess, and cream to put in it, and sugar ; others dispense the prodigious cakes I have described, and any amount of smaller ones to fill up the gaps. That is why there are no gaps in Germans they are so adequately filled. And the ladies sit for an hour. Then they troop back into the dining-room, and more needlework is done, and more gossip spoken and more Sofa Platz business. About half- past six everyone is marshalled back into the dining- room for beer. Then home with your useful afternoon's stitching and your violent indigestion at least for a person not acclimatized. Official dinners, even large family dinners, are very ceremonious. And the food is very good. And instead of getting away from a dinner in time to go on to about a dozen routs and receptions and dances, as one does in London in the season, a German hostess expects to entertain you till about four in the morning or else her party is not counted a success. Such a lot of pounding backwards and forwards to a dining-room there seems to be ! At least my ideas on these social peripatetics are a little confused. One of my most frequent hostesses had been in England had stayed with me and my mother there, in fact and was bitten with the English way of doing things. She especially approved of the English custom of the retiring of the ladies, and this is the way she managed it. The gentlemen rose when the ladies did and followed them into the CH. in] SLEEPY HOLLOW 39 drawing-room, as usual in Germany, but they did not, in Frau B 's house, stay with them for the rest of the evening, as the German habit is.* No, they went back to the dining-room, and kicked their heels there for a bit, and I daresay they found the inno- vation very annoying. But Frau B is a deter- mined little person, and the spirit of novelty is working in her. It is usual for the whole party again to troop back to the dining-room towards the small hours, to consume beer you never get very far from beer in a German menage. Frau B has a neighbour a neighbour who does not care about English habits, but is pushed by her strong spirit of emulation to ostentation and display. She had adopted the plan of giving a Bowie at the end of a party, instead of the milder intoxicant of beer. And so Frau B , after her very good dinner, insisted on giving her guests a Bowie, and a very elaborate Bowie, too, which she had compounded herself in the course of the day. Herr B had not expected it, and when the fat, yellowish mixture was produced, looking for all the world like egg julep that I wash my hair with, his face was worth seeing. He knew how strong it was, egg-flip or noggin, with arack in it and a dozen other fierce ingredients. And behold! it was he who suffered ; I heard him suffer. Perhaps all the other men suffered. I do not know. I happened to be staying in the B 's house at the time, and I should like to point out that this is the normal custom in good French society, where the gentlemen escort the ladies to the salon and then return to the dining-room for a short interval. J. L. F. M. H. 40 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. m although I did not see Herr B till late evening of the day following, I am convinced that he nearly died. Poor man! It was not his fault, but Linchen's. He did not ask for egg-flip, only for mild beer, but once it was there he could not refuse to make himself hospitably ill with the rest. This lusty power of occasional intemperance and the endurance of its brief condign punishment is a useful note in the German temperament. " Most drunk is soonest cured," to vary the common proverb. The continual daily indulgence in luscious and humour-forming foods and drinks is, I really think, the raison d'etre of the Teuton's immense and com- prehensive system of summer Kurs. The German's over-greased digestive organs are the counterpart of those of the abstemious, constipated Englishman. It is the moral incommodity of the latter that he is born without any very strong pleasure in eating. It is his boast that he can eat anything so long as he can get his teeth through it. This is a perfectly true boast, and one that suggests great strength of character ; but unfortunately the true Briton cannot also persuade his weak gastric juices to attend at the behest of his strong will ; and he whose mouth has never watered before he ate has never profited by these tricksy fluids, which are only evoked by the apprehension of the toothsome morsel. Benighted man ! He prefers "nice plain food, not messed up," as my mother's North-Country cook phrased it that is to say, not prepared in a way to provoke the enjoyment that would cause these so recalcitrant juices to flow. On the Continent, where the belly is as god and CH. in] SLEEPY HOLLOW 41 who shall say unrightfully so ? one comes across people who go to the other extreme and overeat themselves ; but even these professors of the sin of enormity do not seem to suffer from the permanent indigestion as the ascetic, patient, plain cook-ridden English seem to do. The Englishman of means is, of course, able to visit Kurs freely, to get rid of his Christian burden of indigestion. Trotting mildly along esplanades and parades he meets middle-class thrifty Germans, come there likewise to profit by the healing waters of their own land. Does it, how- ever, occur to any of my ancient compatriots to think that in so doing the Teuton is both eating his cake and having it ? The Englishman fares to Homburg or Wiesbaden sadly, drearily, to try to modify the results on a poor moral body of a moral regime self- prescribed. The German goes happily, heartily, to be finally and absolutely cured of a plethora of enjoyment, of a year's whole-souled gormandizing. At Homburg or Wiesbaden they meet, they walk backwards and forwards for a month or so in com- pany, imbibing the dreadful water that tastes and smells like rotten eggs but, when all is said and done and digested, the foreigner has his three hundred and thirty good dinners to the good 1 And entertaining in Germany is not always dinners and overfeeding. I have been to many little friendly evenings to which the invitation ran : " Will you come in to roulette and Bowie ?" Then, more often than not, the little reunion gives occasion to another kind of excess, more in harmony, perhaps, with our English idiosyncrasy. Germans, many of them, are great gamblers. The German 42 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. m Hausfrau legend dies hard, but I know of two German Fraus who permit play on these occasions and one who, not possessing a roulette table, allows her friends to bring their own roulette cloth and win her husband's hard-earned money away from him. She sits serene, to outward seeming at least, while, as host, her Mann takes the bank, which always, in private houses, must lose in the end.* Would the guest who sprang such a mine on a quiet, unsuspecting hostess in England ever be asked again ? No ; and I am sure that no English hostess was ever as " sporting " as Frau B , who sat there through the long evening, presiding at the roulette table and over another little table as well, placed at her elbow and supporting the famous Bowie, which was the clou of the evening. Bowie is a delicious beverage, a cup composed of spices and Rhine wine of any kind. It is iced, and served in little glasses that the attentive host, rising at intervals, fills for you. It is strong far stronger than the claret or hock cups of England and you can get tipsy on it quite nicely. The appearance of Bowie on the domestic hearth and advertised in restaurants Mai Bowie Bowie, in large capitals scrawled in by the waiter, is said to usher in the spring season in Germany, as the tap-tapping of the drums of the recruits does the autumn. * This, of course, is nonsense. In German houses the host practically never takes the bank, because the bank invariably wins. On the evening to which our author more particularly refers, the host, unfortunately for himself, was playing against the bank a modification of the martingale, invented by myself, which, how- ever, I never had the courage to put into practice. J. L. F. M. H. CH. in] SLEEPY HOLLOW 43 Does not everyone remember the frigid syphon of England, got in from the chemist's round the corner, with the garish, unharmonious, coloured paper label denoting the place of its provenance ? Or else the home-made lemonade or barley-water for the ladies ; the ugly, unattractive whisky-bottle of fretted glass that is provided, under protest as it were, for the men ? The ladies, of course, never touch it. " A little syphon, please," one hears them murmur as they are putting on their wraps to go. In France, after dinner, there are no drinks at all. There is tea and there are tisanes. There are no droppers-in with roulette boards there are no droppers-in at all. By ten o'clock family life has closed in hopelessly on its unprotesting victims. But Sleepy Hollow is a very good touchstone of domesticity. I wish to put on record my convic- tion my knowledge, in fact ; and I fancy even Joseph Leopold will let the assertion go unchal- lenged that there is no such thing as an easy-chair discoverable on the whole Continent. On that par- ticular count England romps in an easy first, and almost spoils my present contention. But no ; the true inwardness of the easy-chair lies deeper than domesticity ; it affects the brain of the three nationalities. Meredith noticed it ; he actually made it the criterion of power of English and German brains. English people hardly realize how far George Meredith's genius was a product of his early training, and how his general view was affected by it. He spent a great part of the days of his youth in Germany, and if we read " Beauchamp's Career " 44 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. HI we can see how that country impressed itself on him. We can observe the results of German scholarship in his style his style that some people like and others dislike so much, without, however, discovering that it is, partially at least, a result of his German studies. The quotation I give is from " One of our Conquerors." " Have the Germans more brains than we English ?" This is the simple question which preoccupies the genius who, like other geniuses, is of no country. He goes on : " The comfortable successful have the habit of sitting, and that dulls the brain more even than it eases the person. . . . The English, their sports, their fierce feastings, and their opposition to ideas, and their timidity in regard to change, and their execration of criticism as applied to themselves, are a sign of a prolonged indulgence in the cushioned seat." CHAPTER IV UTOPIA* BY FORD MADOX HUEFFER SOME years ago I was discussing with a friend a friend who is celebrated for his building of Utopias what would be the most agreeable form that it would be possible for a country town to take. It was to be a country town which was to be suited for our own living in. It wasn't therefore to be too big, and it wasn't therefore to be industrial; thirty thousand inhabitants is a good size for such a town. We were thinking rather of Oxford or Cambridge, because Oxford and Cambridge are probably the only towns outside London where there would be enough of lettered society to make living possible in England. So we said we must have a University in our town not too big or too distinguished a Uni- versity, because that would make the society of the place too altogether donnish. No; let it be a University founded about the seventeenth century, so as to have some tradition, but one which has not enormously prospered, so that it may not be over- bearing. It ought to have a fairly good University library that, being in correspondence with other University libraries, should be able of itself to * This refers to the town alluded to in the previous chapter as H (J. L. F. M. H.). 45 46 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. iv supply most of the ordinary books that we needed, and from its correspondence it should be able to supply us with nearly all the rarest of books upon occasion. Thus, for society, we should have the professors, and, on account of the educational centre that the place was, we should have the advantage of the company of various pleasant families who were drawn there by the need for educating their children. In the nature of the case these would not be persons actively engaged in commercial pursuits ; they would be officers on half-pay, Civil Servants in retirement, or Colonial Governors. Of course it would be necessary to have a certain sprinkling of the richer industrial classes to pay the town rates. The place might, for instance, be a centre of the cigar-making industry. Cigar factories are not necessarily buildings of an overpowering ugliness, and we must have the town fairly wealthy so as to present a clean, flourishing, and spacious aspect. The centre of the town would have to be old with narrow cobbled streets and high-gabled houses. There are, of course, objections to these sins against modernity. But the electric trams will just have to run slowly. And as for sanitation, there will be no need for a dense population in the centre of the town. And we shall gain immensely in corporate and traditional feelings. Of course, we must have a small market-place with an old gabled town hall. And we must have one or two old white patrician houses. I don't know even that we would not have an old palace, a big, rambling erection of ironstone, to remind us of the time when there were patriarchal potentates. Of course, within the town walls there CH. iv] UTOPIA 47 would not be too many old buildings. Even when we are constructing Utopias we have to remember that we exist only by the sufferance of history. So that where the sixteenth-century houses have been cleared away we can't see any particular objection to white square houses of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They should mostly have green shutters and all of them stand in fairly large gardens. So that wherever we happen to stand, unless it was actually in the gabled market- place, we should always see apple-boughs pushing round the corners of walls or mulberry-trees rising above low roofs. When it came to the town walls, these would have been swept away some time ago. But we would not have let the space upon which they once stood be built upon. No ; eighty or ninety years ago we would have had them planted with trees of a fanci- ful kind, flowering shrubs and grass. So, in the hot weather there would be a shady walk of pleached limes all round the town, to give us exercise when it was too hot to go farther afield. I think we would be the chief town of the agricultural province in which we dwelt. In that way we should have an excellent railway service and we could also have our own courts of justice. These buildings, of course, would have to be outside the town walls. You might say that the courts of justice ought to be in the old palace. But the old palace is not very adapted for that. We want justice to be despatched as easily and as quickly as possible, and we don't want to be stifled when, as part of the public, we wish to attend a lawsuit. So, for the palace itself 48 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. iv we shall give up one wing to state apartments, in case the reigning Sovereign should choose to pay us a visit and walk about the town smoking a cigar. And the rest of the palace will be given up to part of the garrison. And, of course, we shall have our two lines of electric trams running every seven minutes from the railway-station right through the town, past the theatre, and out to the beginnings of the woods. For of course we want a theatre, a big, finely decorated building, with the stage large enough for the production of anything up to " Parsifal." In the theatre there must be a stock company that can play passably well almost any play that we can think of. It must be able to give us the " Merchant of Venice" and someone else "Charley's Aunt." It must be able to give us a translation of the very latest French comedy as well as " Mrs. Warren's Profession," Ibsen's " Lady from the Sea," or Sudermann's " Die Ehre." You may say this is impossible. But we are dealing with Utopias. Of course, in the summer months, when listening to the serious drama is oppressive, we should give the stock company a holiday and roving licence. Their places would be taken by a company coming from somewhere else, and playing operettas and musical comedies. In these seasons, when it is sultry, the sliding roof would be taken off the theatre. The prices for seats would be so small that we could command that every peasant upon the Sunday should have not only his fowl in the pot, but his " Pagliacci " in the evening. And, closing our eyes, we seem to see ourselves looking upwards from the auditorium of such a theatre and seeing CH. iv] UTOPIA 49 above us the stars and, craning over all round the balustrade of the gallery, the quaint caps of the peasant women and the three-cornered hats of their husbands. Of course that, too, is Utopia, but we are commanding what we like from an ideal bill of fare. Let us continue to exhaust the intellectual and artistic sides of our community. For two days a week and on Sunday afternoons the players would not play, and the theatre would be given over to the Musical Society of the town. This Musical Society would be fairly rich and fairly powerful. There would be a musical faculty at the University ; the local garrison would afford us wind instruments; on full-dress occasions we could command an orchestra from a neighbouring metropolis. We should be able for a night now and then to pay the fees of some really great virtuoso who happened to be touring in that countryside. The University would lend us its small Aula for chamber concerts, the theatre being too large ; and choral music we could raise about five hundred voices from the town and its surroundings choral music would be ren- dered in the great collegiate church, where there would be a fine organ. For the fine arts we would set aside a largish gallery, where the collections of pictures would be changed every two months. At times we would outrage the townsmen with loan collections of Post-Impressionists ; at times we would tickle their vanity and their interests by col- lections of pictures representing the scenery and the history of the neighbourhood. Now and again, with a special effort, we would get together some Rembrandts or a collection representing the English 4 50 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. iv school up to 1820. We should, of course, have an excellent museum of local archaeology. The Univer- sity itself would look after stuffed animals. Probably three or four cinematograph theatres would spring up in the place, and we should have nothing against them. And there would have to be, say, half a dozen cafes where one could drink anything from chocolate to cocktails, listen to small orchestras, and read the foreign newspapers. There would have to be also at least four open-air restaurants one in each wind-quarter amongst the woods that surrounded the valley in which the town lay. The town itself, I think, ought to be in a broad grass valley, because we want a river for boating, and river-meadows where the washerwomen can lay out the linen on the grass. Near the town there should be a couple of old castles standing high on pyramids of basalt. These would remind us of the times when robber Barons kept the town under, before the benevolent potentates of the old palace unified and civilized the country. They would also give us pleasant places to which to make excursions. In the valley itself we would have a very rich peasantry, so that whenever we stood anywhere upon a little hill we could see the great stretches of rich, pleasant country with a large number of little villages twenty or thirty little villages with red roofs and the bulbous leaden spires of churches, and the storks flying down to the streams and the woods covering all the hillsides. And, of course, as we were the chief town of the province we should have large hospitals but very large hospitals with the most modern equipments ! Naturally, these CH. iv] UTOPIA 51 would be attached to the University, and naturally, the University would have for its professors one or two of the finest surgeons in Europe and one or two of the finest physicians. This would make us feel infinitely safer in our Utopian country town. . . . Of course, such a town is impossible. It is un- thinkable. And yet from this town we are writing. Yes ; there isn't the least doubt of it. Once we may have lived in Arcady, now we live in Utopia. There isn't a single thing missing of all the things that we have catalogued. The theatre is here and the University library, and the musical society and the companies, and the peasants who go to the opera, and the electric tramways, and the palace and the hospital. And there are even seven book- sellers' shops of the first class, whereas in London you cannot find one bookseller of the first class in the whole of the western suburbs. So that when we come to think of it we are living in Utopia. Yet in High Germany the town of which we are citizens passes for a very miserable little nest, and the town rates are not as high as they are in any English village. It is odd, we are living in Utopia ; we are living in an earthly paradise. There can't be any doubt about it. But just at this moment our man comes in and tells us that the washing will not be home till to-morrow morning, and we become frenzied with rage. We say that we will break the neck of this excellent and long-suffering valet if he does not get all our collars back by three o'clock. Yes; we are all citizens of an earthly paradise, but if we may be permitted the expression we will be damned if we do not leave by the 6.9 for London. CHAPTER V PAX GERMANICA : SERVANTS, FAIRY TALES, AND TAILORS YES, comparing the domestic life of nations, I have come to think that there is a certain dead-level of happiness, or at least contentment, obtaining in the German Empire. It is enjoyed soberly enough, it is true, but enjoyed in the same degree by no other nation. " Dead-level " seems the exact word to ex- press what I mean the organized happiness of a sensible, patient, non-nervous people. It is a hap- piness which is legislated for, happiness that is adjudicated in equal portions to every Teuton in exchange for what is so much dearer to Latins than any amount of ease or comfort their libre arbitre. The Kaiser is pleased to dispense happiness nay, according to some of his recent utterances he con- siders himself bound before God to do so. So he spends his days dispensing legislative ordinances which beseem the genius, fit in with the idiosyn- crasies, of a people so biddable and reasonable as his subjects. He simply and formally guarantees to them a fixed sum of well-being, and I think he does his work very well. No misery shows in Germany ; there is no large-eyed, apathetic, wizened, deplor- able slum-child to be seen hanging about in the squalid alleys of H near the tenements that 52 CH. v] PAX GERMAN ICA 53 house them, just as they do in York or Birmingham. There are no dreary collections of sodden rags slouching along the gutters, picking up refuse, shrieking bad language if interrupted, that answer to the name of "woman," such as one sees rarely and more rarely now in London, but still one sees them now and then. And the sort of outdoor Hotel Dieu that stretches all along the Thames Embank- ment at midnight ; the free seats, which a kind policeman is apt to warn the better class against sitting on, are things a German would blench to look upon and refuse to believe in when told. But, on the other hand, no one ever looks very happy in Germany. I never saw a face that could be called at all symptomatic of the/020 de vivre. No one ever seems able to afford to go " on the bust," or to care to do so. In England "bust" generally means beer, and too much of it. In Germany the stream of good liquor, for the light-paying almost for the asking, flows so evenly, so unadulteratedly, that the delicious forbidden-fruit feeling that tempts a man to exceed is absent. Beer in Germany is properly made and properly kept ; it is excellent, it is delicious sometimes. But it is no treat ; it is just common. In countries where wine takes the place of beer there is no such thing as forbidden grapes. Thus on all hands is the lure of the unpermitted abolished in Germany. Taxed, admonished, cared for, managed out of all individuality, this great people seem to lie in the hollow of the iron hand with a collective content- ment, realizing all through the course of their lives Wordsworth's senile ideal "to live without 54 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. v ambition, hope, or aim," and growing so fat upon the regime as to reassure outsiders that there is no "ayenbite of inwyt" no pulling against the collar. There is no official cruelty. Perhaps, individually, Germans dimly realize that they are fulfilling the ideal summed up by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for the benefit of Hamlet Hamlet, too greedy of happiness " happy in that they are not over-happy." Nor do they seem to be where these cynical gentle- men were not either " the very button of Fortune's cap." To stand for a few minutes in a German waiting- room and survey the mandates on the walls is to realize how this patient people is in Government leading-strings. Why, the entire landscape is plas- tered over with quadrilateral boards bearing the words: "Verboten," "Verbotener Weg," "Verbo- tener Eingang," " Verbotener Ausgang," " Rauchen Verboten," " Nach acht Uhr Morgens Tischtiicher ausschiitteln verboten "(Forbidden road; Forbidden entrance ; Forbidden exit ; Smoking forbidden ; Forbidden to shake tablecloths out of the windows after eight o'clock in the morning !). All these for- biddings meet you at every turn in Germany ; they are alternately grotesque, reasonable, irritating, and sufficient cause for revolutions. The game of poker is forbidden in every State in Germany except in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg. It is to all intents and purposes forbidden to introduce a young male acquaintance to a young female acquaintance ; be- cause, supposing an illicit amour should occur after your introduction, you will be held to have played the part of Pandarus, and will be sent to prison for CH. v] PAX GERM AN 1C A 55 many months. It is forbidden for Socialists to be dancing-masters or teachers of athletics. It is for- bidden for post-office officials to give back the money for one damaged ten-pfennig stamp, but they may do it for ten. I once witnessed the pleasant scene of a father taking three penny postage-stamps to a post-office, over which his little boy had spilt a bottle of ink, and requesting threepence in return. The post-office official cited the regulation to which I have just referred. The father then purchased seven more postage-stamps, gravely tore them into fragments, and received in return for the whole one mark. On the other hand, if you desired to travel to Dorf Entepfuhl, in the centre of Pomerania, or to North-West Chester, a village in Pennsylvania, U.S.A., and if you will go respectfully to the rail- way-station, it will be the duty of an official in blue uniform to give you, written out, the times of start- ing of every train on any alternative route, and of every steamship, from the one place to the other. Moreover, he will telegraph for you to every junc- tion that lies between the place of your starting and the boundaries of the German Empire, and at each junction a railway porter will meet you and present you with your ticket for the next stage, as well as with baggage checks for your luggage. Then there is their comprehensive system of insurance absurd, but far more sensible than the English form in that it really is insurance, while the other is but a form of compulsory saving. Would English servants choose to give their services under the humiliating conditions which affect their Ger- man counterparts ? The German man-servant is 56 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. v hardened to the dossier the card which is out against him, and that can be referred to by the police at his every change of place, and severely modify the conditions of it. He is humiliated at every turn, and takes it out in tips, so far as I can make out. For it is a fact that he is entitled to scrutinize the visiting list of any house into which he is about to enter. And for what purpose ? That he, and the tax-assessor, may assess adequately the approximate value of the tips that he will receive. For every guest, every caller, is expected to tip the man or woman who lets him in or takes off his coat, and every time he calls. An ample visiting list, composed of rich people the tax-assessor takes this fact into consideration when assessing the amount of a man or woman's tax. I was walking through the streets of a small German town with one of these revenue officials who was a connection of Joseph Leopold's, when he observed the servant- maid of one of his friends. Said he to me : " That girl has got a new feather in her hat, I shall have to inquire if her wages have not been raised." This, of course, was a joke, but it came painfully near the knuckle. Such petty tyrannies abound. Still, there are compensations mighty compensa- tions. I had it driven into me very plainly one rainy Saturday afternoon when we had taken a tram-ride from the town of Trier to a village called Eupen. At that time I had a house in London, and in this house 1 had left two female servants, Norfolk girls I say "girls," for with amiable tolerance one always somehow calls servants " girls "; they like it ; but these were women who had been with me CH. v] PAX GERMANICA 57 for eighteen years. They lived downstairs in a semi-basement, light enough, comfortable enough. They had no distressing dossier-, they had no three- penny tax to pay once a week (as yet !) ; they had no need, beyond curiosity, to scrutinize my visiting list ; they had what they loved tradesmen to call for orders. They were utterly self-contained I mean that they had no occasion to go beyond the front gate. They did not, even under the pleasant regime of the telephone, need to be in continual readiness, to be sent out in white caps and aprons, as was our cruel fashion in the eighties, for cabs or to send telegrams. Yet this system, wrong-headedly, they much preferred. Many a picture had I drawn for them of the pleasant Continental fashion of marketing, the " life of the city square," the on dits of the village pump, the occasional street row, the fallen horse, the derelict, unwieldy lads being haled to the lock-up, the interests of the pavement gener- ally. All this excitement, I said, is their Continental sisters' daily pabulum. But one recognized statutory outlet these virgins of the rocks cling to, and goodness knows how thin a strand of pleasure it is their " Sunday out," their ineluctable, indestructible privilege ! But it is all they have, and what the eye sees not, the heart does not lack. If my own austere and middle-aged maids had been with me at Eupen on that Saturday afternoon, they would have turned away with loath- ing from the cheerful sights I saw ; they are too old now, and they have not been brought up to it. They are quite content with their own particular Walpurgis night of once a fortnight. 58 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. v A number of healthy, nicely-dressed girls got out of the tram at Eupen. Some were alone, some were accompanied by young men, sheepish, but not nearly so sheepish as the English youth of the same rank. Some, indeed, were quite sprightly, and wore a leaf in the ribbon of their soft felt hats. All the girls were gay, and with good figures, though inclined to be stout. How many young servant girls in England have decent figures, hold them- selves up, and have rosy cheeks ? Indeed, the exigencies of her place in England demand that an adequate parlourmaid should be slim and " interest- ing-looking" phthisic if possible. We had a girl once with a delicate complexion like a rose-leaf, that she chewed rice and starch to keep up. She died later not much later. These young people fared towards a restaurant, whose porch was wreathed with vines. Inside there was a bar, and a big table spread with different sorts of sandwiches. Attendants hung about ready to dispense them. There were little tables with variegated cloths on them and flowers in vases. There was a string band of a dozen performers on a raised estrade, and a large open space in front of the band, fringed by the little tables. I had a British longing for tea, or at any rate for coffee. I said to Joseph Leopold : " Can't we go in there and have something ?" Joseph Leopold showed himself strongly averse from the suggested proceeding. " It really isn't the place where I could take you," he said, and I exclaimed : " Why, isn't it a restaurant ?" CH. v] PAX GERM AN 1C A 59 " It is the place where the servants of Trier spend their Sundays out," he said. " We should embarrass them very much if we went in and sat amongst them. They will drink and dance, and drink and dance with their sweethearts till it is time to go home." " When will that be ?" "About ten o'clock. What time do you expect your cook to be in on her day out ?" " But if we lived in Trier, and had a house, and had servants, should I allow them to come to a place like this ?" " You couldn't stop them. It is the proper thing all over the country. You probably won't know these well-dressed young ladies again to-morrow when you go to call on the Herr Professorin B , and one of them opens the door to you. Think how embarrassed she and you would be if you had sat and drunk beer in her company to-day and watched her dancing with the man of Professor G ." " Our servants," I said, " wouldn't let themselves down so, as to come to a place like this." " Have our servants got apple cheeks under flower - wreathed hats, and bouncing, springing figures under drab mackintoshes ? I consider the English system of grey slaves immured in basements disgraceful. And when you do let them out they have nothing more lively to do than visit other grey slaves in basements, or walk, the pair of them, gloomy, hopeless, about grey streets, and stare at the closed doors of theatres and restaurants. Here happiness is catered for, pane et circensibus. Weli, come away into the forest, and we may find a 60 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. v forester's lodge where they'll give us beer, and perhaps a slice of black bread and some butter. . . ." We walked along for miles, like Hansel and Gretel, or Jorinde and Joringel, and never saw a forester's hut, or any cottage at all. A German forest is a forest ; it is not only a desert place where the fere the wilde beste congre- gate. I fancy it was my Grimm-fed upbringing which made me stare with all my eyes when I was first introduced to an English forest ; the New Forest, the heathery open waste that occupies nearly the whole of Hampshire. " This is beautiful/' I said, " but it is not a forest." It is no more a forest than my native Northumberland, with the wide, wind-swept moors affording cover to neither man nor beast. Here, in William the Conqueror's great piece of devastation, no tailor could lose him- self, or climb into a high tree to " spy the glimmer of the lamp in a woodman's cottage where he may spend the night." Sentences like these were in my mind : " It was as still as a church. . . . Not a breath of wind was stirring . . . not even a sun- beam shone through the thick leaves. . . ." These legends of Grimm read by the nursery firesides for the mere story and sensation ; the charm to be realized afterwards in cold middle age nearly all begin like this. Or if it is not a tailor, it is a King's son who has a " mind to see the world." Setting forth alone, or with only a very faithful friend, he either loses his way or he comes to some charmed cottage inhabited by an " old woman who is a witch." But it is a real forest that is meant, nothing in the CH. v] PAX GERMANICA 61 least like the New Forest. The nearest thing to that in Germany is the Luneburger Heide, and that is not the locale of these tales of perilous charm. Mr. Walter de la Mare, I think, to judge from his poetry, must have walked in German forests through long days, and felt the exciting sense of wayfaring and the soothing, numbing impact of the slow pro- cession of the hours. The leafy canopies hide the blue sky, and those hours seem to pass audibly in the ghastly silence like the stillness of a room with a coffin in it which is a permanent feature of these birdless wildernesses. They are full, nevertheless, of creeping, prowling, inarticulate creatures. The fall of a decaying leaf, the spring of a bent twig, the sly pad of a deer in its rustling progress through the black brushwood in search of rare spring or distant river, bears an uncertain significance that makes the heart stand still. It is bound to feed the sense of romantic excitement to which every person brought up on legend is inclined to give way on the slightest, vaguest, appeal to the basic faiths of his childhood. Though it is nearly always a forest in German legend, it is not always a Prince. Sometimes it is a wonderful fiddler, or an experienced huntsman, and more frequently than either of these it is a tailor. The Germans have a particular fondness for tailor heroes. They are little and plucky, like Pepin d'Heristal, who must really have been the original of the superstition that good stuff is packed in little bundles. And I am sure, moreover, that they must have come from Germany. The Prince is, as a rule, a faineant. He sits down, and puts his head in his 62 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. v hands after he has lost his suite, and does not know which way to turn. A Princess is generally found at once to look after him. But the experienced huntsmen and the wonderful fiddlers and the lusty tailors are of a finer invention. They climb into trees to get their bearings ; they pass the night on one of the branches to avoid falling a prey to wild beasts, and in the morning they generally see daylight and a way out, or plunge still deeper to find the " charmed cottage," and the old woman in it who is a witch. I must quote some verses of a poem of Walter de la Mare's which, to me, exquisitely renders the sense of imminence, the almost fear of the magic loneliness induced in the romantic mind by prolonged periods spent in a German forest. Weary, pleasingly ex- hausted, one is ready for such faint otherworld suggestions as Mr. de la Mare is able to give us by a touch, a word, a cadence : THE JOURNEY " Heart-sick of his journey was the Wanderer ; Footsore and sad was he ; And a Witch who long had lurked by the wayside, Looked out of sorcery. " ' Lift up your eyes, you lonely Wanderer,' She peeped from her casement small ; ' Here's shelter and quiet to give you rest, young man, And apples for thirst withal.' " And he looked up out of his sad reverie, And saw all the woods in green, With birds that flitted feathered in the dappling, The jewel- bright leaves between. CH. v] PAX GERMANICA 63 " And he lifted up his face towards her lattice, And there, alluring- wise, Slanting through the silence of the long past, Dwelt the still green Witch's eyes. c- o c e " And there fell upon his sense the briar, Haunting the air with its breath, And the faint shrill sweetness of the birds' throats, Their tent of leaves beneath. " And there was the Witch, in no wise heeding ; Her arbour and fruit-filled dish, Her pitcher of well-water, and clear damask All that the weary wish. " And the last gold beam across the green world Faltered and failed, as he Remembered his solitude and the dark night's Inhospitality." * On that particular afternoon when Joseph Leopold and I walked to find a cottage for tea, the sun was not " shining bright, no gentle breeze was blowing among the trees, and everything did not seem gay and pleasant." (That is one favourite beginning of Grimm's.) No, this was such a God-forsaken afternoon as that described in " Jorinde and Joringel." For as these two doomed young lovers went out to wander in the forest all was beautiful and bewitched. " The sun was shining through the stems of the trees, and brightening up the dark leaves, and the turtle-doves cooing softly between the may bushes." Then, feeling the deadly influ- ence of witchcraft, Jorinde begins to cry, and sits down in the sunshine with Joringel, who cries too. " They had wandered too far, and come too near the enchanted castle, whose walls they saw through the brushwood close to them." Yes, all unwittingly 64 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. v they have come into the circle of the charm, and the old witch who lives in the castle, and who must have had a grudge against Jorinde and been in love with Joringel, changes the maiden into a nightingale. She begins to "Jug ! jug! jug !" into the ears of her agonized sweetheart as he sits, spellbound with horror, beside her. He rises to his feet and stands like a stone, and cannot stir or weep, while the witch, in the form of an owl, mocks them. And when the sun sets at last she comes out of the bush in her human shape, and carries off the nightingale, still jug-jugging. The glamour of that tale was on me as I walked through the woods at the side of Joseph Leopold, and watched the sun going down. Strange red toadstools began to glow under the dead leaves in between the twisted tree-roots. We were on the fringe of a much deeper, darker patch of forest, and our path seemed to sway and grow more meagre, and finally to lead straight into it. It was about five o'clock. We were three miles from Treves, and we must follow that path to get home. I caught hold of his arm, and wondered what terrible sound would soon break the stillness. . . . Just as we turned into the wild wood, and lost even the consoling sight of the red disc of the sun setting between the fir-trees below and glowing like a woodcutter's fire, I heard a cry I had never heard before, and one more terrible than I have ever imagined. Harsh, raucous, something between a laugh and a roar, it left me nearly as spellbound as Joringel when he missed his love from his side. . . . " What's that ? Oh, what's that ?" I breathed. " A wild cat," Joseph Leopold said composedly. CHAPTER VI BEER GARDENS v. BEAR GARDENS THE German social institution called Wirthschafts- garten is usually roughly translated in England by the words Beer Garden. And these two words are always pronounced in England with a certain degree of tolerant moral deprecation " And did you really go to one, my dear ?" The Wirthschafts garten is, to my mind, one of the most reasonable, utilitarian, and at the same time poetical, arrangements of a reasonable, utili- tarian, and poetical people. In England, where some emancipated souls read Faust in translations, the scene in Auerbach's cellar is always taken to represent this, the German people's staple form of amusement; hence the shocked question I have quoted which greets travellers on their return from Cologne or Bremen. I should say that the parallel of the scene in the cellar might perhaps have been found in the 'sixties in London night cellars, so painedly described by Thackeray in "The New- comes." Colonel Newcome, who had attended the same form of entertainment in the 'thirties, before he went to India, is said to be indescribably shocked, and takes his young son away with fracas. 65 ' 5 66 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vi But the open-air decent entertainment which the modern Garten Wirthschaften represent also ob- tained in England in his day. I have faint recollections of the last flickering symptoms of it in my own youth. I remember, in those summer days of childhood which seemed so long and so much more summery than any summer afternoons that can occur to me now I remember walking forth with my parents, and perhaps some other parents and children, in very hot weather, about a mile out of Durham, along the banks of the Wear, thinly flowing on its parched bed under Pelaw Wood. And we went to a place called The Strawberry Gardens near Maiden Castle. The children were buoyed up on their long walk by talk of strawberries to be gathered off the bushes. And when we got there we all had to sit down on rustic benches made in one with tables that you had to fit your legs into and not kick. These seats were placed in the narrow alleys of the wide, dullish, not very gay garden. We consumed well, it is so long ago I only remember what I consumed, and that was, I think, strawberries. And these strawberries were gathered, all of them, from the beds at our feet, and they were grown in what is now as black as the Black Country black, but still comely, and not so black as it is to-day under the drifting pall of smoke that sways hither and thither as the wind lists, and cloud-wreaths that incalculably pass low overhead, and stoop, and deposit the smutty death over the land that lies prone at their mercy. Its ruin is certain now ; no strawberries would grow in Maiden Castle Wood in these days, even if the railway had not swallowed up their habitat. CH. vi] BEER GARDENS 67 My parents, on these occasions, drank tea, I think they certainly did not drink beer. Beer would probably have been cheaper, but by that time small beer was no longer the drink of the gentry. And we ate our strawberries on leaves, not on plates ; that I do remember. This was not the only place in the little cathedral town, where such mild junketing as pleased English people then, and pleases Germans now, was catered for. I remember another place of the same descrip- tion supplying the same felt want of simple people, situate on the other side of Durham, a wild and weedy garden among the ruins of the old leper hospital of Kepier. I believe the tea-garden was run by the patrons of an old inn, " The George," fragments of which still cumber the uncared-for meadow where the tea-gardens were. The garden was tended then, and there were borders of flowers that children must not run across. Now, the un- tidiest living animal in the world that is to say a hen picks about in the mossy grass full of worm- casts, and a donkey of the raggedest browses close up to the summer-house where my mother sat with her friends round her, and 1 ran up and down outside in front of them, propelling a rickety per- ambulator. That, too, is gone ; the doll in the perambulator has been relegated to the lower classes ; you never see a " lady's child " with one nowadays. The summer-house, I remember, was a domed, white-painted construction of plaster, with a convex roof and entrance pillars admitting you into a crescent-shaped enclosure of no particular depth. Something very like it used to stand in the 68 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vi avenue of trees in front of Kensington Palace, which was moved, Heaven knows why, and placed near the Lancaster Gate entrance. There is yet another, forming part of the block of the palace buildings immediately adjoining the little old door into the gardens opposite the barracks, where vagrants used to congregate, but are now chivied away by zealous park-keepers, so that pure, clean nursemaids with their charges may shelter from the rain. They are all, these erections, purely Georgian, and so was the one at Kepier. I visited Kepier Hospital recently with Joseph Leopold and went round to where the ruined tea- garden lies, and stood, a mature German Frau, on the very place where, in my blue muslin frock with spots on it, I pushed a perambulator about in front of my Early Victorian mother, sitting dignified in the summer-house, wearing a blue silk dress with a lace collar and a large hair brooch placed just under her jugular vein. Now a bed of dark green nettles grows and leans against the building that used to shelter her, some of the bricks that formed it were showing under the plaster, which had fallen down on the broken floor. Scrubby thorn-bushes dotted the hummocky sward, where an old mare and an old donkey cropped the bare sustenance awarded them through cheap humanitarianism by the users of their prime. And then on another day I visited the other place that I remembered. Long, long since " les lauriers sont coupes " in Pelaw Wood, on the way to Maiden Castle, where my father used to set up his easel, and paint the distant cathedral towers in the hot, yellow, summer haze. The ticket-office of the CH. vi] BEER GARDENS 69 line to Shincliffe occupies the wooded spaces where we used to sit on our dark green painted seats with twisted legs, and gaze down on to the little island in the middle of the Wear. That, too, has dis- appeared. It was just such an island as the Lamb- ton Worm might have coiled around. People in Durham ceased to come ; they preferred a stuffy cinematograph to an innocent jaunt on a summer afternoon such as the German loves. It is, perhaps, the restless Celtic elements in the English population coming to the top that has unsettled it, and bred this change. Or is there a more simple reason the climate ? And for that to be the reason, I must adduce a suspicion of my own that can have, I suppose, no possible ground in atmospheric fact, and that the meteorological data of the last fifty years will not even support. Was the weather in England ever less changeable ? I sometimes think it must have been, at any rate, for a long term of years, and for the many years of my childhood. It seemed then to be more like the weather in Ger- many now, where spring comes so quickly, so vividly, so dashingly, as to justify the enthusiasm of poets for this season ; their printed rhapsodies which, in view of the English symptom of the spring, seem fulsome in their excessive jubilation. And English poetry of the period is full of nightingales, May mornings, violets bathed in dew we have nothing nowadays to set against all the poet's ex- pressed raptures except a speech of Douglas Jerrold's : " I blame nobody, but they call this spring 1" At any rate, this lost social occasion flourishes 70 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vi exceedingly in Germany, where climatic conditions coincide with the social inclinations of the mass of the people. Not a provincial town in Germany, not even a manufacturing centre like the town of Giessen, which in some sort corresponds with the Durham of my childhood, but has its belt of neces- sary tea-gardens. What would Germans do with- out the regular family exodus of an afternoon to some place a mile, or a couple of miles, away from the region of their toil ? This is really a vital con- dition of middle-class existence. And it is catered for most admirably. Foresters' lodges high up in the wooded heights of the Eiffel or the Teutobiirger Wald, abandoned monasteries, distant farms all have been included in this service of fresh air. Many a time, at Hildesheim, or Giessen, or Trier, I have watched the mile-long stream of tea-drinkers, faring laboriously, but with quiet glee, along the dusty, tree-bordered roads to the high garden terrace of some such old convent as the Schiffenberg at Giessen, situated on a hill of a high, strong strategic position, or to some valley- deep settlement such as Kloster Arnsberg, which lies low in a pleasant river-meadow like Rievaulx in England. Or they take their tickets for the Zahn- radbahn up into the Eiffel at Boppard, and march miles when they get to the top, till they reach the forester's hut on Fleckerts' Hohe, where there is an Aussicht. And from an Aussicht this enthusiastic artistic people will not be deterred even by rain. I have journeyed with them, and finding myself turned out of the Zahnradbahn, with a two-mile tramp before me in the pouring rain, have mur- CH. vi] BEER GARDENS 71 mured emphatically and aloud my wish to turn back. Joseph Leopold, obediently turning aside from the promised land of the view at my behest, was forced to listen to the animadversions of the rest of the party on his pusillanimity. " Er ist unter dem Pantoffel," they observed con- temptuously, and turning their backs to us, they trudged, every man Jack and woman Jill of them, sturdily on in the rain in the other direction. But, indeed, on golden afternoons I ask nothing better than to join on to the procession of father, mother, aunts and cousins, and babies in arms, and older children circling round their parents like dogs doubling the distance, and cheering along Gross Mutterchen or Xante, robed all in decent black, and marching with a will. The men carry satchels full of home-made buns ; all that the restaurant will get out of them will be the price of the beer and the coffee, that they cannot well bring with them. The women have their knitting or fancy work in their great underpockets. They are carefully and tidily dressed. It was a privation to me, but out of polite- ness I had always to keep my hat on and so had Joseph Leopold. Any member of the hatless brigade would have deeply shocked these dear decent people. Up to the Schiffenberg, near Giessen, it is, as I have said, a desperate climb. There is a zig-zag path up to the top, of which I availed myself, but I noticed those stout sable-clad German Frauen nimbly scaling the hill where it was steepest, and where there was no path at all. Up they went, the stoutest first, up the sheer bank, treading on slippery, beech-mast, catching on to ineffectual sticks of brush- 72 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vi wood, prodded, hoisted and pulled by their husbands and brothers I dare not say sweethearts, in view of the extremely familiar points d'appui by whose means the services of the strong arm were made available. They looked like a large party of beetles scaling the sheer sides of a precipice. Oh, but the blessed calm of the arched convent porch and stone terrace when once one did get up there ! Sitting on the terrace, in the old cloisters with tables set in the narrow way that nuns in meditation had so often paced, we called for refresh- ments, and looked down on the scene of our efforts. Later on, we rose and went into the inn inside the walls and priced old oak chests. The walls of the staircase were whitewashed, and yet they appeared to bear a leafy pattern, like a well-known Morris wall- paper. I discovered it to be a living wall-paper, composed of fir-branches of even lengths disposed at regular intervals along the dado and placed in a leaning attitude, so that a fair copy of the paper Mr. Morris aptly christened "Evenlode" was pro- duced. All the rooms were papered in the same simple fashion, and visitors could live there at the rate of three marks a day, pension. These conventual offices were built in a circle enclosing a large Platz, part grass, part gravel, with an orchard and a farmyard, a carriage yard, and a garden. Nothing, however, was railed or partitioned off. There was only one building out of use and not kept in repair, and that was the church. We went, Joseph Leopold and I, and an eccentric American poet of tenderish years, into that church. Half one side-aisle was open to the day, and farm CH. vi] BEER GARDENS 73 implements were stored in it rusty ploughshares, carts, and lumber repugnant enough to its former inhabitants had they been alive and cognizant of the desecration. On the more sheltered side of the building, where the roof was still good and whole, was an object which was surely an old thing when the last nun left. It was a stage on which miracle plays had been enacted. We all know that the very name Stage has come down to us from the fundamental necessity of the actors for a raised scaffolding. It is the primary sense of the word the " two boards and a passion" of the Middle Ages. There were two floors to this erection, and on the upper one the actors God the Father, Mary the Virgin enacted their parts, and the heroes of the play, each with his Vice at his elbow, ranted or intoned theirs. Below, roughly speaking, it was Hell, and there the Devil and the powers of Evil lived, and through a trap- door ascended to the floor above and worked their mischief. But they always went down again abruptly and ended in the lower regions. This machine was portable and perishable, and made of wood gaily painted. It was about the size of a modern motor omnibus, the upper floor borne up by fluted pillars, rudely carved and painted. And just such a stage, stained faintly with stained-glass window colours, worm-eaten and ragged with Time's defacement and the insidious damp of every day, stood on the cold stone flags of the ruined chapel of the nuns of the Schiffenberg. This remarkable object was quite rotten with age and the ravages of worms, but even in its decay it was a decorative object. The traces of original vivid painting in primary 74 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vi colours still clung to the decaying woodwork, and the trap-door appeared to be intact. But the re- spectable way up for the heavenly choir of performers had long since disappeared, and the American poet wanted to get up on top. Very much against our judgment, he insisted on clambering up by the fluted pillars, and further scraped and denuded them of the painted arabesques that decorated their poverty - shrunken bulk. Presently we saw him pottering about on top and declaiming his own verse in a sort of medieval chant which would not, per- haps, have disgraced one of the original performers. And then, with a small insidious crash, he dis- appeared and made his descent into hell, covered with the powder off heaven's floor, which he had gathered in his passage through the airy boards upholding it. The poet was not much hurt Heaven had let him down easy but we had to pay half-a-crown for the damage, and I fear we very much knocked another nail in the coffin of the past. That stage will go the way of all stages the sooner for my young friend's careless impairing of it, for though he is a medieval poet, and thin and hungry-looking, he is over six foot, and an athlete. Another time, some German friends took us to tea at a convent in the valley the convent of Kloster Arnsberg but very often it was to quite modern establishments that we went; erections like a smaller Crystal Palace, where those who prefer it can drink their tea or their coffee in glass and under glass. I have lingered outside and watched the children playing ball, and wondered to see their elders sitting CH. vi] BEER GARDENS 75 mewed up, packed like herrings, eating indigestible cakes in very large sections. At Herrenhausen, in the tea-garden there, after we had ordered our coffee we were invited by the waiter to do as everyone else was doing, and enter a glass-house close at hand and choose our own confectionery. There neat-handed Dienst-m'ddchen were deftly dispensing to moist-eyed votaries of pleasure sections of the most various and voluptuous Kuchen that imagination can conceive or melting tongue render. The tables were covered with wooden trenchers, supporting discs of multicoloured pastry covered with sugar icing, and set with crystallized fruit and flowers. Numb with awe, you pointed to the most bewildering example of all this riot of confectionery ; at once a large slab was cut off for you, deposited on a cardboard plate, and you carried it out. Thus did I, rejoining a slightly sceptical Joseph Leopold; the sneer of the Dieted was on his face. And I sat down and ate my slab. It was good, but not so very good ; it was good as a cake could be, I suppose; it probably would give me a mild indigestion, after the manner of rich cakes, but it would not lay me under the table. Yes, I was forced to admit that, although I had chosen it for its tumultuous suggestion of excess, its wild promise of poisonous joys, it was only a cake, and not so very rich at that. It was just like life, or a novel of the East by a modern English novelist. It had momentarily given me the Eastern feeling, and allowed me to imagine that for once I was prac- tising the sin of enormity. Inside that glass-domed 76 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vi mosque, where the choice had been made, I had dared to think that I was Sinbad in the Valley of Emeralds, or a pure Englishman in a bazaar in the naughty end of Cairo. The next moment I realized that the grey reality of greed, stripped and shorn of the prismatic colours lent it by the fecund imagination, was just a plain piece of Sand Kuchen with sugar, nothing more. And I am afraid it is very much the same with novelists' accounts of the acme of dissipation, when the unhappy showman is driven to set down for his readers a picture of the terrible enormities that he has been hinting at and suggesting all through his earlier chapters. Joseph Leopold was drinking honest beer, and knew nothing of these imaginations of mine. For German beer properly made and kept beer is the main point of all this vast system of out-of-door junketing, and do not let us forget it. And the reason that the institution of the Garten Wirthschaft does not flourish in England is mainly a question of beer. In one particular Bier Garten in the environs ot Hildesheim of which I am thinking, on a certain summer afternoon a troop of orderly, sober, decent, suave and gentle persons of all ages and sexes were sitting on freshly-raked gravel, at little tables covered all with red-chequered table-cloths and with coffee- cups and glasses on them. Their children sat beside them, and their dogs couched at their feet or circulated about the feet of other clients. Birds hopped about under the tables, picking up the crumbs which these gentle people from time to time cast to them. There they sat, stolidly, composedly, CH. vi] BEER GARDENS 77 as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouths, gulping down grosse Hellers and kleiner Dunklers, and more and more of them, with no diminution of their holy calm. Their dogs did not quarrel, the birds still hopped about their toes in utter confidence ; every- one was sure that no chairs would be hurriedly pushed aside or angry words flout the sweet air they were taking in, amid smoke of cigars or pipes, and the soft breath of human converse. And dis- creet wives, with their children of all ages to think about, kept an eye on the sun and saw that it was declining. When they thought it was time, they folded up their fancy work, wrapped up the re- mainder of the buns, shook the crumbs off their children's bibs and folded them up likewise, and turned their eyes westwards to where the gilded spires of Hildesheim seemed to point them to their homes. Then men got up and shook themselves, and paid. There was in them plenty of beer, but not the least bit of harm in the world. Could the same have been said of men and women in a like case in England ? Think, even if other circumstances had been equal, what it would have been after a couple of hours' seance in England ! We should have had the ugly sights and sounds so demoralizing for children that an enlightened Government in England has decreed that father and mother must run their own errands to the public-house. Gross words would have broken the calm of the evening hour in the country of strenuous temperance and protective liquor laws ! But there are no places of this kind in England. And if even a 78 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vi place of this description should have, somehow or other, scraped through with a licence, what manager would have dared to risk the responsibility of the direction of such a hot-bed of trouble and drunken- ness ? Why, even if he had got the Government to lend him a force of police to hold in readiness he could not manage it ! It is to a certain extent the quality of English beer which prevents the estab- lishment and survival of the innocent form of weekly saturnalia that I am advocating in England ! German beer is not in the least like, in strength, in quality, or maturing, to the stuff which notoriously wrecks the Englishman's peace of mind, his pocket, and his home. It is not heady, it is diluted ; it is not drugged or doctored, and it is kept properly. I never saw in Germany anything tantamount to the swinish buvette of France, the terrible nouvel art Bottle and Jug Entrance of England, where brutal men and haggard women slouch in and out in search of their anodyne against the cold, dull, pallid misadventure of their homes. For the public- house in England is neither more nor less than a chemist's shop, where the best drug of all is sold across the counter, and where light is. Light, more light, and yet more light ! Does anyone realize the exhilarating powers of mere light on these animals coming blinking, peering, out of dark, airless caves, where they grovel on the fringe of destitution? I am glad to think that the Puritan spirit in England, which vetoes colour, charm, gaiety, and all attempts at beauty, true or meretricious (mere- tricious beauty is better than none at all), cannot prevent the gas-lamp's flare, however dreary ; the CH. vi] BEER GARDENS 79 coarse irradiation that forcedly illumines every three or four paces of the dim street or alley. One hears the temperance advocate bewailing, " Every third house is a public-house !" Can they wonder ? The large coloured bottle in the windows of chemist's shops are not there for nothing ; light attracts, and both forms of drug-stores have discovered that elementary fact. In Germany I am constantly pulling Joseph Leo- pold by the coat and praying him to let us enter here, into this or that prettily decorated little hotel or restaurant, with flowering oleanders in pots near the door, and soft brise-bise curtains in the windows and not too much brass about, but plenty of nice brown panelling. And as often as not he refuses because a gentleman cannot take a lady into what is, after all, a public-house corresponding to the gin-palace in England. Any place of call in England which permitted itself to be as attractive as any one of these would indubitably lose its licence. Govern- ment morality would be on its hind legs at once lest vice should masquerade as health, as joy, as beauty. It carefully penalizes joy and merry-making by the enforcement of due ugliness in every place where this habit is permitted to be indulged. Does an English landlord desire to make his hotel or restaurant the least bit attractive, he wisely sends out for his liquor sooner than ask for the licence that is sure to be refused him on the pleasant face of it. I have on several occasions persuaded Joseph Leopold to consent to take me on a Sunday after- noon or evening when a concert of some sort is 8o THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vi announced by a placard over the door of The Anker or The Hirsch. And sitting on the edge of the form, in front of a table with a white cloth and a mug of beer in front of me on a white pad to catch the drips, I have watched the other quiet people, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, sweet- hearts, lonely bachelors, all likewise occupied, and the strains of a good German band resound in my ears, less cultivated than those of the modest couple beside me, or the sweethearts who break off their lover's talk to listen. And yet, socially speaking, I have really no business to be there, and the solemn Frauen who, maybe, come next day to sit on the edges of the chair for a brief statutory visit, would perhaps leave off calling if they knew where I had been sitting the day before. For it is just as if I had been sitting with a hall porter and his wife, with Mary Jones who opens the door to me, with the men who clean the windows in a public-house, neither more nor less. Oh no, 1 never mention it, nor that I am writing a book about Germany as an excuse for my indecent gregariousness. But the use by my class of the open-air tea- gardens, some of them, is not more reprehensible in Germany than sitting in the park on a Sunday, on the slopes in Kensington Gardens in England. It depends on the neighbourhood, of course, but in a garrison town, say, like Trier, you sit next officers in full uniform with long swords trailing in the dust beside them, and smart German ladies with their dachshunds and poodles. The carriages that have brought them out of Trier stand with the shafts flung back on the green hard by, waiting to take CH. vi] BEER GARDENS 81 them back. There is quite an atmosphere of " the best people " about it all. We had no carriage and no motor, and we did not know our way about. One afternoon, at Treves, or Trier what do I mean by spelling it the French way ? we crossed the river aimlessly and reached the suburb called Pallien. And there the idea of tea I say tea from alien habit : it is generally coffee overcame us, and we wondered at the end of what nice longish walk a pleasant Wirthschaft- garten might exist ? We followed a certain German family, who had crossed in the ferry with us a family of about six persons, an obvious papa and mamma, a little boy, a little girl, a father-in-law (?), and a sister (?), also a white Pomeranian dog. We stepped side by side with them to the foot of a sheer red marl cliff with a long ascent of stone steps cut out of it. They were obviously preparing to climb it, so as to attain to the heavy woods that clothed the summit. It seems preposterous to earn one's tea in so painful a manner, but as Joseph Leopold said, what they can climb, surely we can climb ! And though my spirit fainted many a time, where a stout, heavily-clad German Frau leads cheerfully, must not a slight, wiry, lanky, ex- Englishwoman follow ? And for nothing in the world would Joseph Leopold have desisted once the battle was joined. So we came after them, at a respectful distance, and began to ascend the stone steps. At the top we had a few moments to survey the famous Marien Saule. This is an altar to Minerva which the Roman occupiers of Trier placed there 6 82 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vi years ago. The pediment remains ; for Minerva the Virgin has been newly substituted. So placed, she dominates the town, and at night the fan of seven electric lights that is arranged over her head in a sort of smoke cowl, winks and stares like a beacon. We passed her, we passed the gates of two tea- gardens. They appeared damp and closed for the season ; it was October, and a little late in the year for outdoor amusements. We passed them by. On the way, the little white dog showed an inclina- tion to nag the big brown dog ; the big dog showed the smaller at once that it did not intend to allow it, and our wise guides endorsed the demonstration, though it was evidently attended with some dis- comfort to the little white dog, who was a fool and a pet. Having learned its limitations it subsided, and there was no more fighting that journey. We all crossed a sunken meadow at the top which seemed to me to be the crater of an extinct volcano, the sort of Kessel in which the whole village of Schwalbach is built a valley sheltered in a hilltop. Then we proceeded to go uphill again through covered ways where only two could walk abreast. These were skilfully engineered in the sides of the mountain, banked by spreading tree-roots and roofed by their branches. We ceased to see the sky or to know how much farther we should have to ascend. The thin stems of the trees stood away on either side of the hollow pathway : they were of a vivid coppery green that spoke eloquently of damp. We went along in comparative silence. We felt bound to leave a correct distance between us and the party in front lest we should annoy them, CH. vi] BEER GARDENS 83 and lead them to suppose that we were making use of them and did not know the way to to the place where we were all going, quite as well as they did. But , wherever it was, was a very long way off. And we mounted always. Joseph Leopold was growing visibly and audibly thinner. Indeed, we both puffed and blew. We were not near enough to our guides to ascertain whether they were also out of breath, but I fancy they were not. You see, they knew exactly how far their powers of endurance would be tested, and they were sure of tea and buns at the end. At least, we hoped so ; but the dreadful supposition occurred to me : Were they all on their way to visit friends ? " Yes, probably going out to tea on some German Campden Hill or other," Joseph Leopold sneered. He considers my old home and its customs as painfully and ineluctably suburban, and never misses a chance of a gibe at it. But he did not want to upset me too much, and he was quite amiably sure that a tea-garden of sorts was the vision that lay on the eyeballs of our precursors a vision of an actuality, and no false mirage. Still the road wound uphill all the way, which is quite contrary to the usual run of roads to dissipa- tion of any kind. The spindle legs of the child in front began to wobble for me, and I ached and groaned audibly. We had come a good four miles without seeing so much as one glimpse of encourag- ing daylight, and were thus absolutely unable to gauge the probable height of the ascent we had so rashly taken. After all, this couldn't be the Eiffel, 84 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vi for it wasn't marked large and looming on the map. . . . And suddenly we lost them, the white dog, the spindle-legged child, and the rest. They seemed to sink, with all our hopes of tea, below the verge. . . . And that is exactly what had happened. We had now reached the very top of the hill, and the path had taken to going down as steeply as it had come up. We hastened on, and peered, as it were, over the edge and saw their heads, and observed the man of the party, stooping, take the white dog off the lead. We now gained hope. They must, by this sign, feel that they were near a goal of some kind, and that therefore the little cherished white dog could neither lose itself nor get into mischief. And although hope now waxed strong, our poor tired legs, braced to the ascent, resented the reverse movements of descending. We saw only a moral daylight ; no actual ray pierced the leafy canopy overhead. But we were careful to lose the pioneers no more ; we kept them well in view until such time as, after a fit of pain- fully increased velocity, we seemed to tumble and fling ourselves down into a small green clearing, fathoms below, with the dull shimmer of a little river running peaceably, and not in the least like the mountain torrent it should by rights have been. And on its little banks there were orchard trees and a little house, and beyond, a green prairie dotted with little tables tables with the tea-heralding red cloths upon them. A high hill, covered closely with trees like the hill we had just descended, rose up on the other side of the valley, and shut the little CH. vi] BEER GARDENS 85 paddock, where the grass grew very green, com- pletely in. And when we came nearer, right down to the foot of our hill where the rustic bridge was that admitted into the little pocket garden, I saw the glint of an officer's the glint of two officers' uniforms. I saw a handsome landau with its shafts turned back, and I saw a man in a tree gathering plums on the river's brink. My pains were assuaged. We took a table, ordered coffee and Strufel Kuchen all there was and waited till a handmaiden should appear, bearing the usual packed tray, tread- ing delicately in the long grass, for fear it should throw her down. Joseph Leopold smoked a fat German cigar, and I talked to all the friendly dogs that galloped round about and came to me and asked for pieces of Kuchen. Some of the officers who owned these dogs approved of my advances ; some of them didn't, and called their beasts austerely to heel. I was up against German convention again ! So I desisted, and sat still and kept my eyes in the boat, and watched the purple plums fall on the grass as the man in the tree shook them down hard by where I was sitting. I watched a lady at the next table to me get up and take a fidgety, fractious child a very fidgety, fractious child for Germany to stand under the tree and perhaps succeed in catching a plum in the lap of its frock. And I heard the lady say in German, smiling, however, as sweetly as possible on the rest of the party, " I leave my character behind me." And I turned to Joseph Leopold, and said : " How like Campden Hill ! Would you like to leave at once, and look for something less cosmopolitan ?" 86 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vi But Joseph Leopold was happy, and busied with guide-books to enable him to find a different way back to Trier. Neither of us wanted to climb all over the Dead Councillor again. What a name for a hill ! So I went on listening, trying to find out if the family of the lady who had taken the naughty child to see the plums fall were really taking her character or not schwatzen. I don't believe they mentioned her ; she had apparently disarmed criticism. They sat and watched the good children that remained consuming StrufelTorte, a very whole- some cake, appropriated for young ravens, because it is so dry that you are compelled to chew it adequately. A way was found. We left the Dead Councillor severely alone, and walked home by the road to Trier, through the valley that broadens out as you approach the city. We saw by the guide-book that ruins of the seats of Roman country gentlemen flank the road ; we were not very far from Neumagen, where Constantine built himself a palace. The road from Altenhausen it was Altenhausen where we had had our coffee was very lonely in the gathering dusk. The carriages in the inn yard had long since been inspanned and had driven away. The road was bordered with white stones at least, they were white only on the sides where they faced the approach to the road at right angles; the sides parallel to it were tarred black. It is inconceivable that I should have had to ask Joseph Leopold the reason of this, and I will not really insult the reader by passing on the explanation that was given me. Only, I was under the impression that, even with so CH. vi] BEER GARDENS 87 much beer about, the German coachman could always be trusted to know his way home in the dark. It was quite dark when we at last reached the outskirts of the town of Trier, ugly and unsightly, as even the outskirts of beautiful places are. Waste matter is always pathological and repulsive, and the bigger and finer the house the greater amount of waste product will be engendered. And one has somehow to take the detritus of civilization into account, and make room for it. It is like toleration in marriage : there must be a midden and a box- room. But high up and far away on the heights we had travelled over that afternoon Minerva Virgin, Goddess, under whatever name we know her by brooded, and flung her seven-rayed light wide over dark alleys and railway sheds and trucks, and the converging tram-lines of the city she protects and dominates. CHAPTER VII PRINCES AND PRESCRIPTIONS THE Kur that great German institution in which Englishmen and Englishwomen are glad to partici- pate would appear to be specially designed for the traditional German. The traditional German eats a great deal, drinks a great deal, and takes no exer- cise at all. Real Germans a good many of them that I have known eat very sparingly of food cooked "a la mode du pays de France," and walk twenty miles a day. There are always, however, the obese and unregenerate of both nations, and these are pretty well represented at the dear, smart little towns towns without personality or civic character of any kind which lie scattered all over Germany. That is the horrid part of it. If you are well enough to do what is called " poke about " Homburg, or Ems, or Nauheim, or Schwalbach,you are all the while disagreeably conscious of the purely parasitical nature of the dull louts, male and female, who look sheepishly out of cottage-doors, or slouch about with pails and spill things into the gutter. These good people, you realize, are tamely going about their business of living under the heel of the alien crowd of visitors by whom they exist. 88 CH. vn] PRINCES AND PRESCRIPTIONS 89 I suppose villes des eaux and spas have a mayor and corporation ; but in the case of these sort of towns one feels they are only there for the convenience of visitors, and to adjust any matters of business that may arise say, such a serious undertaking as the cure of illustrious and marked persons. I happened to be at Nauheim during the stay of the Tsar at Friedberg, a romantic visit undertaken for the cure of the Hessian Princess who is the spouse of the shadowed despot of All the Russias. It was supposed by her physicians that the ruined nerves of the royal lady might benefit by a stay at one of the baths of her native country, so the marked pair abandoned their policed palace and their royal safety yacht, and came to Hessen, and motored in from the Castle of Friedberg, three miles distant from Nauheim, every day. Detectives swarmed every yard of the way ; Friedberg was full of them. And, indeed, before His Majesty the Tsar could even be allowed to take up his abode in that place or visit Nauheim, the place of his wife's cure, the mayor and corporation of Friedberg had insisted on the royal guest insuring, out of his own pocket, all the principal buildings ! Bombs will occur even in the best police-regulated establish- ments. And when the unfortunate royal guest, having complied with all these behests of a careful, tactless burgomastery, came over to Nauheim with his children, and essayed to walk quietly about in the streets of the town he was himself pecuniarily at least protecting against the possible conse- quences of a too ready hospitality, he was mobbed and 90 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vn followed and persecuted. He complained bitterly, so we heard, and presently an urgent but polite notice did appear in the corridor of all hotels, asking the guests to be so good as not to mob the Tsar. I fear very few of them attended to the prohibition. 41 La chasse au Tsar " continued, and to track the poor man into a shop, and, making what is called a feint of an " ugly rush," lead him to believe that he was in a guet-apens, was recognized as a lawful amusement by certain dull, enervated people, who form the staple of the patrons of Nauheim. Anyone who, as I did, expected to see an enor- mous proportion of traditional Germans in these sort of places would be disappointed. It was rather the other way at any rate, at Nauheim or Schwalbach. For one fat German I saw two lanky Englishmen, with wives to match. English dys- pepsia seems to attenuate, not increase the girth. I saw ethereal heroines of English causes celebres walking about, reading good books. I saw croupy young Englishmen doddering along the pleached alleys, with glasses in their hands, the murky con- tents of which were connected with their mouths by a tube, and little napkins to wipe out said glasses, tucked into their sleeves. English self-indulgence would appear to take the form of malnutrition, and weak hearts to be the result, not of intemperance in diet, but some mad riot of nerves. However, there they all were, parading, prome- nading, taking short red walks or long blue walks, according to their physical capacities for relating, and that of the friend who accompanied them for listening, to detailed and never-ending recitals of CH. vii] PRINCES AND PRESCRIPTIONS 91 their symptoms. A Kur is the only place where it is literally manners to talk of your stomach. With brief intervals for the reconnoitring of the paint marks on the green trunks so considerately put there by the Kaiser's orders, each part of a system for pointing the way for the walk of a given dura- tion, the conversation in a Kur promenade is all pathological, deeply egoistical, and boring to the nearer who is not in a position to offer up one of his own defaulting nerves for dissection on the platter of friendship. There is, indeed, only one way of enjoying one- self at a Kur. Every prospect pleases, and so on. But one must be allowed to forget the reason why man is admitted into this paradise. Once and once only I paid the toll to Caesar ; took a bath and took a drink. The drink upsets you for days ; the bath is neither here nor there. It was at Schwalbach I was immersed. I felt as if I were champagne, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim. This agree- able sensation lasted ten minutes. Then, plotzlich an impartial machine of a stout bathing woman came noiselessly into the Bad Zimmer, unceremoni- ously brushed the mousse off me with a large bathing towel, and I became myself again, with only such bubbles of the spirit as Nature has endowed me with. Though people at a Kur unmistakably enjoy talking about their symptoms, one notices that perhaps the most fanciful and discursively descrip- tive among them, while anxious to retain the sympathy of their fellow-sufferers, are chiefly intent on evading the more tiresome minutiae of the cure 92 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vn on having a good time, in short. And the cunning German physicians are no doubt fully aware of that, and depend on the good air of the place and the fascinations of the Landrath he is always a good- looking, fine-set-up man, it appears to me far more than on prescriptive rules which are meant for really ill people. These form the dark, grey back- ground of the crowd of merrymakers. These are the people who do actually die, and whose remains are hustled away in the night or early morning to avoid unpleasantness. And a German hearse is of the most sinister. Grim chargers, with black trap- pings that come down to the ground, suggesting the armoured destrier of the days of feudal fighting, through which the vast round eye of the horse gleams forth, large, portentous in its rim of sable, strike a foolish terror to the beholder, and remind him disagreeably of the fact that doctor's orders are not always made to be disregarded. But, seriously speaking, a real cure, undertaken in a business-like manner, with a pure liver and a con- trite stomach, simply means putting one's neck into a collar of slavery. If you do not consistently regard your doctor as a meddling rival, neither your time nor your money is your own. Whereas, if you keep up a proper degree of spirit in your dealings with him, you have the cheerful sensation, so con- ducive to health, of moral self-assertion, a moral victory, something done, something accomplished, and the really excellent air of Nauheim, or Schwal- bach, or wherever you have elected to reside, to the good. The iron in which these regions abound, enters then into your body, not your soul, and you CH. vn] PRINCES AND PRESCRIPTIONS 93 benefit by the Kur; you flirt with the handsome Land rath (whom, as 1 have remarked, is always good-looking enough to be worth while in these carefully-catered-for health places) ; you win enor- mous sums at bridge enough to pay all your home debts which are secretly worrying you and you do really and truly benefit by the cure, in your own way, which is the best. On the other hand, if you virtuously lay yourself out to observe faithfully all the narrow-minded, pettifogging, unimaginative behests of your tem- porary lawgiver, who doesn't know you or your mentality from Adam, and who is in league with your landlord, for early closing and plain living and high paying, your cure at once becomes a mere purgatory of small agitating engagements, far more enervating and exacerbating even than the London or Paris or Berlin season you have come away to recover from. Here is Doctor Bittelmann's sort of regulation. I may mention that Doctor Bittelmann of Nauheim is charming, and a thorough man of the world, and doesn't in the least hope or expect you to carry it out. Your bath at ten, say ; then lie down after it for an hour. Good ! You do bathe ; the expensive bath is something positive that you pay for. But, good heavens ! you don't have time to lie down. You can lie down for nothing, and at home. You eat by command, at some earthly hour one o'clock, most probably and you are to eat the very things you don't like ; you are to have your salad mixed with lemon-juice instead of oil and vinegar, and you are to drink Fachingen ! But how can you talk or be 94 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vn amusing on Fachingen ? How can you digest what you don't like ? Well, you settle it. You do eat later ; it was so difficult to get away from that fasci- nating seance at what do you call him Zucker- bakker Muhle? and the little cakes spoilt your appetite. You eat the things you like at lunch that is to say, the things you can eat and you don't lie down again after, as desired, because lying down always makes your head ache so. And for all these extra arrangements there simply isn't time, that is the trouble, not want of bonne volonte on your part. If you followed out all the absurd directions you are given, and that your physician feels in duty bound to order you, you might as well have stayed away altogether, for you would be useless for all the social purposes that really brought you to Nauheim, or Schwalbach, or Schlangen Bad. And there is the truth of it. For, good heavens ! there is here, say at Nauheim, a bathing establishment, a spring, and what not, just to give the place its name, but there is a great deal more. The bathing establishment and the spring are only the bait, the inducement, something that corresponds to the " little music " you arrange for a party at home, to make people talk the band at a garden-party, the lady who sings Indian lullabies, the child who recites so marvellously, and whose name you are sure you forget. It is the brilliant magic Kur-Haus that you have come for, where all is silent and nearly deserted in the mornings, and waiters and other ministers of our joys hold them- selves in reserve till midday, when all breaks into life and song. You may see performances, you may CH. vn] PRINCES AND PRESCRIPTIONS 95 go to concerts, and you may play bridge all the afternoon under the open sky or the tented veranda. The soft sunlight permeates all your gaiety, soften- ing the glare of the red geraniums in the parterre and the blue caps of the bandsmen, and the scream- ing toilettes of the professional beauties. You can play lying in a bath-chair, if you prefer it, with a rug over your knees to get the spirit of the place, the soft, pleasing, egoistic spirit of wealthy in- validism. And the afternoon wears on to the sound of the chastened band, the delicate crunch on gravel of high-heeled shoes, and the trail of ethereal Paris- made garments. You eat succulent cakes and drink mixtures through straws brought to one by well- drilled waiters who never tread on your toes or tear your flounces. You win, you lose, the sunlight soaks into you, and you go home to change. What for ? To don the most expensive form of dress known, the half-high, the smart non - decollete. Modistes know how incompatible the two are ; inferior craftswomen rely on the wearer's trimming the dress with her own charms, as it were. Thus expensively, ruinously robed, you eat good dinners under fierce electric light, and as the one concession to the spirit of the place it is the only concession some patients make, and then it is only because they are constrained by the management home to bed early. At the hotel, arriving quite early, a re- proachful house-porter lets you into a twilight hall ; it feels like three in the morning in England. If you happen to be a little late, say after ten, there is even a vague atmosphere of reprobation about this functionary, erst gold-laced, but in mufti after ten. 96 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vn I felt again as a girl feels, when she comes home in the small hours, to be let in by a sleepy, reproachful maid, whose duty it has been to sit up and welcome the piece of perishable goods that has been out in the great wild world. The Kur-Haus of Nauheim is on the slope of the hill, a little above the town. It is pretty and gay, like most Kur-houses everywhere. Its clients are, of course, thoroughly cosmopolitan, comprising complacent financiers, hungry adventurers, beauties " on the make," of every type and nationality at least, so I am led to suppose, and I fancy that is the attraction of these foreign baths to the English nation. Thackeray skilfully cast around these clients of German thermal springs that vague aroma of devergondage, that intimate flavour of impropriety, of possible scabrous adventure, which appeals so deeply and intimately to the middle-class for which he catered. Needless to say, Baden-Baden or Nau- heim " met tout ses biens dans la devanture." The shady people are the decor, the attraction provided for Mrs. Brown of Brixton, who is there, with Mrs. Jones of Ealing, in force enough to make these places pay. Mrs. Brown of Brixton thinks it a holiday privilege to be allowed at Rome to do as Rome does, to put down her gold piece at the same table as Madame Medee or Countess Calypso (I borrow Thackeray's effective nomenclature). She expects, as I did, the first time I went to Baden- Baden and Homburg, to see sinister-looking, per- nicious gentlemen engrossed in playing petits chevaux, or baccarat Thackeray had named them for me, Count Punter, Marquis lago, Captain CH. vii] PRINCES AND PRESCRIPTIONS 97 Blackball and it was only after I had been about that I realized that the most sinister-looking of them all were respectable English stockbrokers, husbands^ of the Mrs. Browns who boldly touched hems with the skirts of, it was fondly hoped, un- mentionable ladies. Only in the holidays. The sight of weeping Dover cliffs on the return home purges away all the foreign devilry that Mrs. Brown may have picked up on her travels. I know Mrs. Brown now ; once I might have taken her for Madame de la Cruchecassee, or Madame de Schlangenbad, ogling and scandalmongering on her cane chair. And the wicked Lady Kew person, that comes hobbling on her crutches round the corner, is much more likely to be someone's maiden aunt, come away from her provincial lair for a " thorough change !" And Mogador la Princesse de Mogador ! (" Tu fumes, Mogador ?" Here Thackeray was really funny) sat in every railway train. Well, she sits there now. Mogadors we have always with us. She trails past my modest chair even now with her cortege of Grand Dukes and "favourite officers of the Emperor," in which the place abounds. But just as all the champagne grown could not back up the marks on the bottles that stand on restaurant tables, so with the Kaiser's favour, though this label is given impartially to every smart officer. These fine fellows have all hearts; the ugly, material, lop-sided one within them they have generally injured by excessive attention to and prowess at polo. That is the chic cause of their presence at Nauheim. The Kaiser does not care to 7 98 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vn lose them. The other, more elusive, article they swear by and are fond of putting their hand to, is at the service of every pretty girl who comes to Nauheim without a heart at all ! Poor wasp-waisted creatures ! As fast as they cure the one organ, the other spiritual one suffers by reason of its extreme susceptibility. I was able to oblige one young officer with an unpronounceable name (I may meet him again). The Kaiser loves him, of course, and he has some English. He admired a young English lady who was staying, not in my hotel, but in the hotel of a friend of mine who just knew her by sight. Affected by Lieutenant L 's persuasions, I got my friend to scrape acquaintance with Miss D , and eventually asked her to tea in her room. I brought Lieutenant L , so full of pleasurable anticipation and excitement that he could eat no cakes at tea. But the affair came to nothing. I discovered that the Dream, to the spiritual young favourite of the Kaiser, was more than the Business. He had now formally made the acquaintance of his goddess, and, consequently, he no longer found pleasure in de- corously dogging her footsteps in the Kur Garten, and under the tall trees of the Allee as she fared home. She had a pale clear-cut face and a neat ankle, and wore high-heeled shoes with a big bow on the instep that looked as if it never could come untied. Grand Dukes real Grand Dukes are fairly plentiful at Cures. You can be taken in, though, and some Americans I once met at Langen Schwal- bach felt this little form of humiliation very much. CH. vn] PRINCES AND PRESCRIPTIONS 99 There was a stout, beefy gentleman with a toady in attendance, who wrote on his card " Due de Sirio," and stuck it on the green baize notice-board in the hotel among the cards of the other visitors. (I have never seen this remarkable custom anywhere else.) But that gentleman's card-case must have been soon exhausted, for some real gentlemen bearing good old English names, staying at the hotel, tore it down every day, declaring that this was no Duke, but a grocer from Amsterdam, with his handy-man who sliced up the hams. We all danced with the Duke at the Kur Saal ; he danced beautifully. The American contingent had gone nap on him, and refused to believe that he was an imposter. But the absurdly meek manner in which he, or his toady for him, conscientiously replaced his card every day, instead of calling out one of the hooligan gentlemen who were endeavouring to destroy his prestige with the ladies, ended by convincing these fair ones that the claim so weakly supported could not be genuine. They abandoned him with painful self-loathing. I, for some mysterious reason, fancied he was what he said ; there was a depth of assurance about him, a sturdy, stout, devil-may-careishness that was sooth- ing. To be truly soothing is a quality of the true aristocracy in Germany, at all events. There was, however, an unmistakable, publicly ratified Grand Duke at Nauheim while I was there ; I believe he was related to the Kaiser. So popular was he that he only dined once at his own expense during the whole six weeks that his cure lasted, and that once was when he, as in duty bound, re- turned all this hospitality in the lump. For every ioo THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vn pretty woman in the place felt it her pleasant duty to dine him at least once and invite any lady he admired as well as herself. He preferred Americans, with an occasional incursion into Dutch territory Americans, probably, because they are still capable of being frankly dazzled by the old order, which is by no means passing away in Germany. He was a dear, good, rubicund soul, with no harm in him, and exquisite manners, and looking at him through the glass window that divided the indoors restaurant from the little tables outside where one drinks one's coffee, one found some difficulty in realizing that he was a King. He sat there, towards the end of a good dinner tres en Edouard, as someone said, and indeed the likeness to our own Edward VII. was striking with Jungfrau Van Der Hulkne on one side, and Mr. Douglas P. Fridey on the other, both savamment decolletees, both yielding, caressing, jolly and easy- going as far as their own strong sense of propriety and the rules of the place permitted. One felt that, veiled by the social hypocrisies of the twentieth century, the usual royal programme of the seven- teenth and eighteenth was being rehearsed. They had all dined too well ; the ladies were all impressed to slavishness by the gracious favour of the potentate, and perfectly prepared for any due old-fashioned exercise of the royal prerogative. Yet they sat there and digested, and sipped liqueurs, and said nothing. They were all flushed, but with the effort of eating ; they were all bored, and that was with the Grand Duke. But they were dining with a King, even if they did not realize it, as I did. CH. vn] PRINCES AND PRESCRIPTIONS 101 These stout, healthy scions of old reigning families are spread all over Germany, rulers of Federated States allied to Prussia, not loving Prussia defying Prussia, some of them. But the submissive ones do really carefully and seriously rule over the small States that are theirs by inheritance. They have their own courts of justice, their own little armies degenerated in most cases into a mere bodyguard, and in some others into a household of servants who could fight if need be. One reads in English social annals of German Serenities, German Princes, German Hochwohlgeborenen, all alluded to in the slightly contemptuous style, introduced by a man who had both what is called a " down " on Germany, and a sneaking fondness for her Thackeray. Nothing but his love for the Protestant succession kept his tongue from covering the four Georges with an overwhelming load of journalese mud, and Dapper George got off lightly with the clinging sobriquet. But on Grand Dukes and Serenities his pen has always wagged rather indecorously, and English people seem to have adopted his characterization, and regard these politically earnest and serious people as mere social symbolical furniture to liven a bazaar or gild a society column. And, indeed, their unobtrusive presence at the villes d'eaux lends a colour to their desultory view of the importance of their functions. They should be seen at home, in the due exercise of them. It is when you are in some obscure provincial town, and pay your way in coin struck in their effigy, and hear them and their princely doings, the literary, moral, artistic opinions of their wives spoken of with 102 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vn respect, that one realizes for the nonce, and with regard to the particular piece of ground that you stand on, the despised Grand Duke is your King, and that there is no parliament to stand between you and him. Any impulsive decree he may choose to put forth at the dictates of his so respectable or capricious wife, perhaps, and motived by some entirely personal feeling is law. The wife of the Grand Duke of H. has chosen to close down the State Theatre in H. because of the private life, reported to her, of some of the members of the famous company engaged to play in it ! You see, the King's powers, though not extensive, are absolute. He is your Commissioner of Woods and Forests, your Board of Trade, your Chancellor of the Exchequer, your head of police, all in one your overlord, in fact. His place one of his places fills up the centre of the town. He may live in it, and lend it as a park when he is not there, or when he is there and amiably dis- posed ; he may live somewhere else, and loan it as a barrack. He has plenty of houses. Outside the town lie his Schlosses and pleasure seats, where so many beds are always made up, ready for himself and suite, or any guests he may send, and where he takes your mark for a sight of his old armour, and family pictures and beds. His powers are apt to your limited topographical intelligence to cease quite abruptly ; a thin line, as imperceptible as the solemn, old, mysterious, equatorial division of our childhood, separates the particular sods of earth under his direction from those that own the sway of the next Prince. Yes, a man in Hessen-Darmstadt may lead a horse to water, CH. vn] PRINCES AND PRESCRIPTIONS 103 and twenty can make him drink in Hessen-Nassau. The rules of life and conduct are perfectly different, full of character, full of annoyance, too, sometimes. Mental friction is thereby daily produced. In Hessen- Nassau, say, you knock up against some teasing, trifling ordinance or bye-law! You exclaim indig- nantly, " But I've always done that !" and when you are in a fair way to be arrested you recover your- self, and realize that that was when you were, a quarter of an hour ago, in Hessen-Darmstadt. And in the eyes of the instructed in such matters, local costume may even mark the change, and not too insidiously either. Sitting in the train, looking out idly on the weather-beaten human furniture of the fields, you can tell to a nicety in whose kingdom you are. The noble female creatures, with their stately port, who cover the ground in Hessen, marking the furrows with their broad swinging strides, wear vast woollen petticoats, " kept out," as we women would say, by bolsters at the hips, of a strong stained-glass- window colour, suggesting the pictures of Ford Madox Brown red, green, and blue, all of them at once. It is harmonious enough in the clear, strong light that seems to shine nearly always in Germany. On their heads they wear little knobby caps, in shape like an ensign's, embroidered with seed pearls and broad black ribbon strings falling on either side of the face, like one of Andrea del Sarto's Madonnas. You are in Hessen-Darmstadt. Farther on, as you look out, the petticoats are made of coarse, stiff, black calico, shining coppery and iridescent in the sun. The beggar-maid's clothes in " King Cophetua " have just such a metallic sheen. On their legs they io 4 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vn wear thick, white, openwork stockings, with coloured ribbon garters ostentatiously displayed, and on their feet heavy shoes with buckles. You may know that you are in Hesse when you see, as the train leaves the station, a couple of these women looking like beetles burnished in the sun, with their hay-forks lightly poised on their shoulders, walking in skirts that Genee would think far too short to dance in, down the asphalte road, talking and gesticulating like fury, under the hot exhausting glare. They are fairly cool ; their skirts are of calico, not woollen, and they have no bolsters. And after the train has stopped three weary times more, long, draggled, abject-looking skirts, such as one sees anywhere in England, are the fashion. Another district and these represent the really free peoples of Germany. At least, though they are the property of a Grand Duke, who owes in his turn allegiance to Prussia, they have not taken Prussia's prizes for costume. Prussia cunningly encourages the survival of costume, because it enhances in its wearers the feeling of their German nationality. For many centuries, indeed, these Hessian lands felt a great spiritual kinship for France, and even to-day in many of the lonely farms of the older peasants you will find portraits of the great Napo- leon. Sometimes, indeed, this opposition to the immense and savage dominion of one State over all the others assumes heroic proportions. It is a curious sensation to walk about in Hanover stately and magnificent Hanover and be told that a Regent holds sway there, and that the real potentate CH. vn] PRINCES AND PRESCRIPTIONS 105 lives, an exile, in Munich.* He is in contravention of the Kaiserliche Decree, he refuses to swear alle- giance to the Emperor, and until he does so he may not walk under his ancestral limes, or sleep in one of the hundred beds that are constantly kept "made" in his country seat of Wilhelmsberg. He is old, he does not care. He is one of the truly romantic figures of the twentieth century. But who should meet him in London society would probably regard him as a mere figure-head for Bazaars and Opening Festivals. I should like to meet him, for I know better. * Written in 1910.]. L. F. M. H. CHAPTER VIII BLUE PATES AND SCHOPPEN I KNOW a child who, when she was asked where she would like to be taken for a summer's holiday, chose to forego the spades and pails of Ramsgate and Cromer in favour of the Isle of Athelney, if island there be, because she wanted to find the hut where Alfred the Great burned the cakes. I wanted to see Marburg, because I had read Kingsley's poem, and was interested in the pious lady whose husband would not let her be charitable. Meeting her with an apron full of loaves for the poor, he asked her what she was carrying, and God so willed it, that when she obediently opened the folds of her apron, flowers fell out of it, and justified her pi^ty. And one evening in autumn, as our train glided softly and sweetly as trains do glide in Germany out of one valley into another, till we came into the valley of the Lahn, which is the river on which Marburg is built, I was thinking in a desultory manner of my childhood's desire, and the saintly figure of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. Presently the train just slid into Marburg, and we got out and passed out of the station, through a flower-besprent waiting-room, and into a bus, and 106 CH. vin] BLUE PATES AND SCHOPPEN 107 jogged along to our abiding place under the impos- ing shadow of the Elizabethen Kirche, and all the while I was thinking of Conrad of Marburg. I wanted to say that now, to my grown-up lights, the builder of the Elizabethen Kirche seemed an uncommonly silly woman, but I am always afraid of offending Joseph Leopold's Catholic susceptibilities, so I switched off from medieval sentiment to the heroine of a modern extravaganza, which I suppose every English person has read. I was now domi- ciled in the German University town that corre- sponds more closely to Oxford than, say, Bonn, which to me suggests Cambridge. We all remember how Miss Zuleika Dobson, after having drowned the flower of Oxford in the Thames, calls for a Bradshaw, and looks out a train for Cambridge, intending to do the same by the students of that University. But I do not think, with all respect to Max's heroine, that this would have come so easy. For though it might be urged by some Oxford fanatics that youth, subjected for a term or two to its romantic and unique charm, is still capable of drowning itself en masse for the love of a lady, I don't, think anyone would put up the same plea for Cambridge. The Backs are too Tennysonian, not savage or Byronic enough. Cambridge would think twice about it. But of one thing I am positive that such an out- rageous sex-campaign as that waged by this young lady at the English University would have been absolutely impossible at either Bonn or Marburg certainly not at Marburg. Bonn is less savage, less rococo, more accessible to feminine wiles. The boys of Bonn, even with the national precedent of Werther io8 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vm before their eyes, would think, not twice, but a hundred times, before making fools of themselves over a mere female. Marburg would not entertain the idea for a single moment. Yet Marburg is surely a more romantic place than Oxford. It is living. It has kept up its continuity with the past. There are not so many "dreaming spires," but there are three very wide-awake churches. The castle at Oxford is an inconsider- able ruin ; it is down there by the slums, a mere appanage or lean-to of the railway-station ; while the Schloss at Marburg is 1,000 feet above the town, and in the very centre of things, dominating all the modern life of the place. The River Lahn is not so wide as the Thames, and there is no boating in particular to be had on it ; but the boar comes down from his lair in the hills to drink of it, and the wild cat laughs in the woods that clothe its banks. Oh yes, it is far more romantic. For mere unconsidered peasant females there wear costume, though professors' daughters, so haughty and ad- vanced in ideas, are kept plain, much as they are anywhere. It is, I believe, or used to be, a standing grievance with Eton masters, ever since a young peer of seventeen ran away from thence with a mature English Countess, that they are ethically debarred from keeping a pretty daughter at home. She is sent away on visits as much as possible, if she is of the type that is likely to be upsetting. It is quite immaterial to Max or Fritz at this period of their growth whether the daughters of their tutor are pretty or plain. These young ladies may, as far as he is concerned, continue to reside in CH. vm] BLUE PATES AND SCHOPPEN 109 their father's house, and tread the sharp cobbles of Marburg with no fear of being followed, and sleep sound of nights without any danger of being serenaded. Plain or coloured, Max or Fritz heeds her not to either her or his detriments. But Max and Fritz are not " quiet " ; not at all I They have plenty of fun, but it is concerned with quite another goddess than Venus. They go in hordes to dine at some place in the woods, smoke and drink, and finally are photographed with their arms round a goddess of sorts. She is covered and wreathed with flowers but she is a beer-barrel. This is probably a safe derivative for such emotions as the student can spare from his studies. He does not insist on a yearly carnival of sex, such as May week or Commem. And it is not in the least neces- sary that his bedmaker should be old or ugly. No woman born at least, no woman born on German soil could take him by storm ; and even if Zuleika Dobson, that lovely exotic, with her pink pearl and her black pearl, her costumes and her engaging ways, were to descend at the best hotel or come to stay with a professional uncle in the college, she would not, it is my belief, be able to extract a glance from the splendid students with the cropped heads and the scarred cheeks, who sit day by day at their especial Stammtisch in the Ritter or the Krone. Much less could she persuade them to throw them- selves into the slow and sluggish Lahn for her sake. At least, I think not. I am bitter. For I have never in all my life met anything more impervious to feminine wiles than the German student. I could not get so much as a look of intelligence out of any i io THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vm one of them, of bored or annoyed intelligence even, although on the first night of my arrival I did a thing calculated to stir such a one to the depths a thing that made the waiters blench with awe and hastily interpose to forbid the sacrilege. I made as if to sit down at the special table with the little bronze knight in armour standing in the middle of it, bearing a banner inscribed with the magic words " Stamm- tisch." Head-waiter Ernst warned me off just in time. Joseph Leopold was too slow ; and a moment later only a moment later a stern, handsome man, with a large head and a shaven crown, advanced with a fine deliberation. He had hung up his hat on a deer's antler in the little passage which led into the street, and sternly bidden the Great Dane who followed him in to lie down. Great Danes often lie down near me, but I had long realized it was as much as my place was worth to pat a student's dog. "It is reservirt!" Ernst informed me in a breath- less whisper. He meant the Stammtisch, placed in the best and warmest corner of the Speisesaal, the least draughty and at the same time not too far from the window. It was the table that a newcomer would naturally turn to. A low seat runs round the corner, and overhead there is a locker built into the wall, with the arms of the corps whose students are pleased to dine here engraved on it. The door of the locker clicks as one student after another opens it with his key, and abstracts papers from it, or deposits the cap he is wearing, anything of which he wants to be rid for a few minutes. The student can do as he likes. He is everything at Marburg. There is a tremendous suggestion of CH. vni] BLUE PATES AND SCHOPPEN in insolence about these German hobbledehoys, these Teutonic gawks, if indeed anything foreign can be gawky. (I begin to think the term was invented only for the young of the English.) At any rate, of their contemporaries at Oxford a hostess has been known to say, when the question of her capabilities of entertaining them in the lump arose : " Oh, one just asks them all, and knocks their heads together* and sees what comes of it !" Imagine these classic, * The fact is that there is much less difference between German University life and English University life, as far as the personnel is concerned, than between, let us say, Greenwich time and Central European time. I have myself, extra-professorially, entertained the German undergraduates ; and I have been the confidant of the woes of the German Don's wife, at being called upon to entertain, towards the end of term-time, large numbers of her husband's students. It is possible that the German student is a thought less snobbish than the English undergraduate, but it is hardly more than a thought. The German, like the Englishman, is very much given to little personal cliques or to little personal studies that will monopolize the whole of his attention ; and for a senior in any way to arouse his interest in other or more general topics, is to knock at very closed doors. I have, for instance, at a sort of commemoration dinner given by a German professor of history, tried to arouse some sort of interest in the " spotty boy" sitting next to me, as to the elective theory, let us say, of the British Crown, a subject, one would say, suffi- ciently interesting to anyone professing history as the occupation of a life-time. But this youth was interested solely in the hand- writing of Charlemagne, and in the linguistic attainments of that great man. He was, that is to say, professionally interested in these subjects. But what immediately occupied his attention was : How much of the furniture of a student, called affectionately the " dicke Hans," he would be able to afford to purchase next term, Fat Hans having obtained his Doctorate with a thesis on the laws of Charlemagne, and being about to vacate the desirable rooms that he had hitherto occupied over a pork-butcher's shop in the Frankforter Strasse. J. L. F. M. H. in THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vm shaven heads of Germany, that I will endeavour to describe presently, being knocked together or treated with anything approaching to the disrespect and contempt which I have seen poured on the heads of the flower of English youth at Oxford or Cambridge. I have watched them, caught at such an entertainment, massed in a doorway, too shy either to get in or out or leave the asylum of the herd. The German students are men of the world : they all look like men ; at any rate, the percentage of spotty boys which make up the hordes of an English University is far less, and the spots and boils of German youths are produced by quite another cause. I am being mysterious, but indeed I was myself mystified at first. I had heard that " youth's hope and manhood's aim" in German Universities was very different from that embodied in " wines " and bump suppers and silver football cups, and larks altogether, not omitting a slight, very slight, leaning towards the successful acquirement of scholarships. Yes, the insolence of these boys was not as the insolence of Prussian officers proud, unlettered, and empty-headed ; it was the influence of the savage intellectual the ferocious educated. A bookworm in a German University can be a swash- buckler too ;* a mugger-up of scientific facts can collect honourable scars as well. * I suppose this is physically possible, but actually it is much rarer than that an English Lord Chief Justice should possess an oar with a blade painted blue. The fact is that German University life is going through a period of change. Regarded as an appari- tion in an institution devoted to study, the Corps Student is a phenomenon of the most singularly undesirable, and all the efforts CH. vm] BLUE PATES AND SCHOPPEN 113 Entranced, I used to watch these tall, fine fellows entering in with their obedient dogs, their hand- some sticks, and their noble thirsts, which they extinguished in such manly, mighty Schoppen. One by one they dropped in, with a nod or a " Tag ! " to whoever had dropped in before them, flung an order to Ernst, and then buried their noses in their mugs and in the profoundest college gossip for so I suppose it was. I used to refer my curiosity to Joseph Leopold, who has been a student himself, of German professors of to-day are directed towards diminishing their number in favour of increasing that of the " unattached." It has always seemed to me that the whole machinery of German education is extraordinarily wrong-headed, and must prove fatal in the end to the German race if some such change as that which the German Professoriat is trying to bring about be not very speedily effected. These poor boys I give these views as being purely personal are treated at school with an educational brutality that is almost incredible in the civilized world. They are hideously overworked ; they are unnaturally stimulated by their parents ; they are treated to the most brutal sarcasm by their oppressed schoolmasters if, in any particular, they fail of absolute efficiency. The suicide tale of school children in Germany is, without any exception whatever, the most hideous feature of modern life. I think no one will deny this who considers how worthy of tears a thing it is that a young child should commit suicide because it has failed to pass an examination ; yet this suicide rate is extra- ordinarily high in Germany. But once they have matriculated into their University, these boys are turned absolutely loose upon towns singularly full of what are called temptations. They have no supervision of any kind ; there is no " gating " ; there are no chapels. The normal career of the German student of the German student who, by the grace of God, gets through is that he should spend two years upon the Bummel, in the sort of pursuits so vividly described by our author : drinking beer, fighting duels, upsetting sentries in their boxes, and making night hideous by howling at the doors of women of the town. In the 8 ii4 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vm but now wears enough hair to cover what in these boys used to attract my eyes and distract me from my dinner. In my humble place in the outer hall I used to sit and watch those wonderful grey-green craniums, like a piece of polished jade or pale lapis lazuli, with a network of vague lines crawling right and left and across. . . . I once possessed a Japanese doll. I remember its mild broad head, so like a baby's, so much out of proportion to the rest of its body, and on which the first faint adumbrations of the down that would soon be hair were traced by the hand of a skilled Japanese meantime they contract huge debts which their miserable fathers, who are mostly small officials or Lutheran pastors, have to bankrupt themselves in order to pay. If these proud creatures be not too far sunk in debauchery, their third years they will spend in a scramble for items of knowledge that is almost more ignoble than their former pursuits. For it has struck me very strongly, when lecturing at German Universities, or attending lectures given by other professors, that what takes place is not a pursuit of learning for the love of a mellow and lovable thing ; it is a frantic and bitter chase after items of knowledge, each item of such knowledge being worth, let us say, fifty pfennigs a year more to the student acquiring it when he shall have reached the age of fifty. It seems to me, therefore, that the whole system is exceedingly pernicious certainly to the body and decidedly undecorative and ungracious for the mind. But, of course, other people will have observed other things, and to the debit balance one may set the fact that one or two " spotty boys " at Berlin or at Jena will certainly be interested really and unashamedly interested in the handwriting of Charlemagne, or the Rastadter Congress. They will not be ashamed of these interests, and they will not conceal them out of the idea that it is more high-spirited to be exclusively interested in the topic of who will be head of the river ; and eventually they will be given posts as under-tax collectors or second-class post-office clerks in the State to which their University belongs. J. L. F. M. H. CH. vm] BLUE PATES AND SCHOPPEN 115 artist in faint patches of an electric blue colour. And the head of this doll was exactly like the head of any German student who is fulfilling the duties incidental to his position, and means you to know it, by these presents. . . . He is not an escaped convict not even a convict would stand being shaved and pared down to the very quick like this. Nothing but fanaticism, of a sort, could accomplish the state of mind which endures willingly, nay, proudly, such an appalling act of disfigurement. No, this student that I see before me has simply proved his courage and is continuing daily to prove a state of courage that no man could impugn. He has gained a position that is eminently worth while in this troublesome world of pugnacious fellow-students with their sharp, flat duelling swords, so dreadfully handy. For he is a duellist, and these are honourable scars, gained in single combat. He has shown the stuff he is made of, and proved his manhood in half a dozen or so fights. Why should he allow the marks of his courage to fade away on cheek and jaw, when they are a sign for all adversaries to stand off and not provoke him. It is glory glory that might fade, but is not allowed to do so. To that end salt and other disturbers of natural healing are rubbed into the raw wound. I repeat, it is worth while. What matter that your sweetheart can hardly look at you without laughing, or your wife luxuriate in your fond connubial gaze without dreading a mishap? You infallibly suggest to outsiders, " L'homme qui rit," and though Victor Hugo implies that the love of Duchess Josiane stood the shock, we are not told n6 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vm whether the grin of the romantic mountebank was not perpetuated in some English nursery. Josiane was an English lady of the Court of Queen Anne ; the standard of looks in Germany is not, and perhaps never was, so high. The German Frau, too, is reported submissive, and knowing the provenance of these scars, does not jest at them, but respects and cherishes her doughty knight of the Rueful Countenance. The institution is as old as the hills. Though these combats are nominally forbidden, it is not easy to carry out the law and fly in the face of a national custom. Duels used to be fought in the open not necessarily under the sky, but in some large semi-public hall or room in the house of the corps on whose behalf the fight is undertaken. However, the forces of sweetness and light have objected and the authorities are formally charged to prevent it. The belligerents and their ring of friends go out to some rather distant clearing in the woods, driving there with some slight pretence of secrecy. They take a competent surgeon along with them, for he is quite sure to have some work to do. Certain self-preserving preparations are gone through before the two combatants face each other. They put up masks to shield the eyes and gorgerets to protect the throat, but the top of the head, the cheeks, the nose, and mouth, are left vulnerable. The favourite stroke of the flat swords used in this ferocious game seems to be directed at the top of the head ; the result of the dexterous cut at once provides a cunning piece of work for the surgeon. Supposing you slice, with the thin sharp knife CH.VHI] BLUE PATES AND SCHOPPEN 117 used by the professional dispenser of ham in a pork-shop, the top of a very thin-skinned orange that has not been boiled to make it look big and swelled ! You do not slice it quite off, but up to the last tenuous piece of connecting fibre. Then suppose someone else forthwith lays it neatly on again, pressing the edges closely together, and with dexterous needle and thread makes the work sure. The thin-skinned orange is a good parallel to the thinly-covered scalp of the student from which his brother duellist, with the flat of his sword, neatly takes off a layer of skin and gristle. The delicate operation of joining it again is the surgeon's job. The appearance of the head when healed would be that of nearly all student's heads. The scars lie in circles all round the top of the skull instead of criss-cross. You can sit at concert or cinematograph, and contemplate at your leisure something like a blank school-map demonstrating facts of physical geography. The watersheds and rivers would be indicated in faint blue lines meandering over a pallid, dimly-shaded surface ; and that is what your eyes rest on for the whole of the evening, and you are glad to be spared such a prolonged vision of the cuts over the cheek or the jaw. I cannot no, I cannot be brought by Joseph Leopold's arguments to see the justification for such voluntary imposition of physical ugliness. "You mouth, you ape, you make yourself faces !" says Hamlet. And such faces ! The swollen, puffy cheek, bloated like the con- tents 'of a pan of red-coloured jam that bubbles as it comes to the boil, or seared or drawn inwards as if ii8 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vm all the teeth had been pulled out through the livid cheek there is no excuse for a man making such a beast of himself to see. For the head passe encore ! The proud protagonist may condescend to grow hair over it when the time for his youthful follies is past ; at any rate, he is obliged to wear a hat every man and every woman, too, must in Germany ; it is a terrible solecism to omit the head covering but this grotesque rictus which meets you suddenly round a street corner before you have time to avert your gaze makes you long to degrade courage from the rank of the virtues. These cuts, as soon as they are perpetrated, have to be attended to on the spot, as I have said, and this is where the crux the last fine shade of stoicism comes in. It is not enough to endure the evil ; the warrior must endure the cure as well, without flinching. Sitting stiffly in a wooden chair, it may be in the heart of the spring woods with brooks rippling and birds calling, with his victori- ous enemy and all the members of his corps stand- ing attentive round him, the gory victim of a superior sense of honour must suffer in cold blood the exceedingly painful business of being sewn up, without flinching in the very slightest degree. The practised needle goes in and out, the birds sing on, and the brook ripples, and a dozen or so of eager eyes are fixed on him. He must not show by moan or movement that he is a man of feeling. To wince, to flinch, the flicker of an eyelid, is to be shamed, disgraced, and cast out from the corps whose honour he has fought for. Unto this end he must fight, or all is in vain. And it is fact that the duellist CH. vm] BLUE PATES AND SCHOPPEN 119 generally stands the ultimate test of courage success- fully, and is not afraid to fight again another day as soon as his reputation grows a little stale and needs renewing in the eyes of his compeers. This is the sort of man who possesses Marburg in and out of term time. Even in the vacation the Stammtischen are fairly crowded. The streets in vacation are rather empty, because the students take the opportunity of long walks in the country, when not recalled hour by hour for classes and lectures. And the country round Marburg is not tainted with suburbanity like the environs of Oxford, where you have to wade through miles of mean streets before you come to even the Port Meadow ; or Cambridge, where you may walk for miles and miles and find nothing more rural than Trumpington or Chelsford. But you can walk out of the main street of Mar- burg, past the railway-station to Wehrda, or go by the woods over the Augustenberg or by steamer down the Lahn; an affair of twenty minutes, and then you are in the country at once. The steamer is a little motor-boat engineered by a boy and a half-witted mate. The Lahn is like a backwater of the Thames or the Warwickshire Avon at Stratford. And when I was ill, I found this little silly steamer ride very soothing. It took us slowly, stiffly, puff- ingly to a village of no particular beauty or import- ance, with a cafe in a dull, stony garden, below which the steamer stopped. There were a few tables, with checked table-covers on them. You could sit there of an afternoon and watch the dull folk landing, and see the train for Kassel disappear under the tunnel 120 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vm on the other side of the bank, and watch the little moorhens ducking about and the water-rats setting out to cross the river, till a stone thrown by some idle tea-drinker headed them back. It used to move me to a weak frenzy when I saw a solid, lazy German stand up and try to defeat the poor beasts' nice little energetic scheme. . . . Then the coffee and milk in thick jugs would come, and Pflaum Kuchen, a horrid contrivance of cold pie-crust with stewed plums strewn on it, which I could not have been persuaded to eat in England. And steamboat loads of dull, heavy, tame people would come up, and I could have touched their hats with my hand as they passed up the landing-stage under the balcony of the tea- garden, but I was too weak. And soon the daylight faded it was late September, and the railway-arch leading to the tunnel grew dark and portentous, like a troll's cave, and swathes of oily mist began to hang over the river. Then we descended the water-stairs and puffed along in the low boat until the towers of the Elizabethen Kirche loomed big and near. Sometimes we walked to Raubach over the quiet, ordinary, English-looking fields. One could picture Faust and Wagner, students both, taking their memorable walk across these cultivated hills, and discoursing of forbidden, pernicious things, while the dreadful black poodle, who turned up from no one knows where and accompanies them, circles ever nearer and nearer through the corn- stalks. Heinrich Faust and Wagner are both men of the world, well versed in all the current magic of society devil-lore. They know, both of them, quite well, that " the Pudel " is the devil. They are CH. vm] BLUE PATES AND SCHOPPEN 121 not afraid, but Faust's friend Wagner does not quite like it ; he says something, not much, about the poodle's inconvenient shadowing, and those few calm remarks, their slightness, give a very complete feeling of artistic discomfort and diablerie. But when I was recovering, I used to get up as far and as high as the Wilhelmsthurm perched on the end of the great moor, and then I found myself in a region as wild as the Lake District in England. I had to go round the easier way, which is the longest, but at every turn of the zig-zag we met perspiring Fraus being positively " boosted " up the steepest slopes by their husbands and sweethearts. They did prodigies of endurance, these women, and their men were strong and kind. I no longer need to wonder how the great trilithons of Stonehenge were brought to Amesbury. Husbandly devotion and the joy of a holiday can work miracles. And there was a Kermesse going on on top. The great barrels of beer which these brave souls were to drink had been got up there too, and in much the same way, no doubt. If you go west, towards Cappel, and up to the Frauenberg, you find yourself en plein pays de geste. But it is a long way to the queer-shaped volcanic hill crowned with ruins of different periods ghost- haunted, full of buried treasure. Here there is a lonely forester's lodge, where a family has lived for generations. You drink tea there I mean coffee and the old grandmother in her decent black gown, her peaked face looking like the shadow of her personable daughter-in-law in the prime of life, and holding a little sticky grandchild by the hand, comes 122 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. vm and asks you how you like the Sand Kuchen, and wishes you God-speed on your walk home. And the walk home, rather late, with the sun making haste to be down and you hope it won't before you get home, but you know it will how queer it is ! You walk along timidly on soft leaf- bestrewn ways, under the shade of tall pine-trees, so high that between the lower part of their thick boles the tricksy sun, that has nearly set, plays hide-and-seek. It seems at one time utterly gone out and departed this side of the earth ; at another, gleaming sudden and angry between the dark bars like a woodcutter's fire. You hear the crunch of your own tread, pit-a-pat ; the forest is so big and you are so little, and every now and then you stop and think that you hear the rustle of a deer or a wild boar. ... "Es kann wohl sein" (It might easily be), says Joseph Leopold. . . . Yes, even Faust and Wagner, with their conver- sation so skilfully woven of philosophic doubts, would seem modern here ! Mailed knights should be riding to the succour of distressed maidens. I should see the shiver of grey steel flickering across the vistas, to be lost again in the woodland shades. And it is not only strangers, or quasi-strangers like myself, who feel the uneasy charm that hangs over these birdless thickets. Once we had been to a Kermesse up at the Frauenberg, a scene of gaiety, light costumes, dancing, merry-go-rounds, and happy people drinking beer over wooden tables, up there on the hill among the ruins. But still, when the sun began to go down, there was the fearful return journey back to Marburg to be faced. CH. vni] BLUE PATES AND SCHOPPEN 123 People started in company, and, like Grimm's Little Tailors, they all sang to scare terror away. Joseph Leopold always chants in a loud voice the Lieder of his country, and his compatriots seem to like it. There is an Austrian Jodel song : " D'runten auf dem griinen Au . . . Steht ein Birnbaum so blau I" And if one meets, as we did that day, three of the belles of the Kermesse returning home to recount their little triumphs to the Mutterchen in Marburg, be sure that they will be wreathed together arm-in- arm, walking in step and singing in unison some such song as Joseph Leopold's. They are Catholics, so he tells me, for they are not in costume. Catholics repudiate the Kaiser's encouragement of Protestant survivals. We lose sight of them ; they walk faster than we do, and I am oppressed by the sense of the hour, and full of an unreasoning terror lest we miss the way. For the sun has really gone down, and the light has for- saken the green leaves, and the colour of them is heavy and vapid, and the chills of night begin to creep in. It is always thus, and I am always afraid. It is getting too dark to study the blue and red and yellow marks on the tree-trunks that tell us the way to go. We are embarked on a yellow trail, and it behoves us to examine nearly every tree at least, I think so, though Joseph Leopold doesn't. I am afraid I shall hear a wild cat scream. . . . The last journey-man disappears ; there is a sudden declivity in the path, and the sound of the pretty girls' carol- ling fades out of hearing. All my days in this land are rounded off by a silence the silence of a German forest. CHAPTER IX CHESTS AND COSTUMES IN Marburg, which is in Hessen-Cassel, consequently in Prussia, I looked out of my bedroom window one morning and saw something like a kingfisher pick- ing its way, in little sharp erratic dashes and capri- cious loiterings here and there, on the cobblestones in front of the Elizabethen Kirche. The day was young, and it was the festival of Sedan. The king- fisher was a very young peasant, one of the early birds that find their way into town first on a feast- day. It was so early that she obviously did not know what to do with herself. Presently she was joined by another flashing iridescent creature, arrayed likewise in all the primitive colours. Together the two passed under the window, and stood about under the trees of the Marbacher Weg, and gossiped. I watched them lazily, as an invalid does. Their lower circumference was very wide. Their heads formed the apex of a cone, crowned with the red cap like the " little round button at top " of the mandarin in the rhyme. Their bodices were of velvet and their neckerchiefs of white silk. Their scarves, carefully, negligently tied, hung back over their shoulders. Their buckled 124 CH. ix] CHESTS AND COSTUMES 125 shoes clicked on the stones. They seemed as quiet and decorous as it was possible to be, while their outside was like a leaping coloured flame. Under the trees of the Allee they passed and repassed, flaring like a couple of humming-birds or parro- quets, in gait as demure as doves, and as gentle. And by-and-by, as the day wore on, the streets of Marburg were full of these gem-like figures, all come in from the surrounding villages, moving as boldly, as easily, as theatrical stars on the front boards of a theatre. Marburg as a decor is rather sophisticated an old town full of bits, but mainly modernized. There is a large plate-glass windowed shop, whose recesses display the finest confections of the best milliners in Frankfurt Frankfurt where, as everybody who dresses knows, you can buy as good clothes as you can at Monte Carlo or Paris. In a back street is the shop where the peasants come and buy the materials for these dresses, costing very often not less than ten or sixteen pounds. Over the door of the shop is inscribed " Landes- tragen." In another shop are dolls dressed out in costume. We all think the costume very old, but, as a matter of fact, it came in with the Reformation,* and it would * I do not know what may be our author's authority for making this statement, nor do I fancy that she knows herself. The fact is that it is extremely difficult to date any given costume and many varieties of costumes are to be seen together in the city of Marburg. The one which our author has more particularly described is that worn near the villages of Amoneburg and Kir- chain. It dates, in all probability, from the sixteenth century, or possibly from the eighteenth, since the men who wear costume on holidays carry under their arms cocked hats and wear knee- 126 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. ix be dead ere now only that Prussia encourages it. Costume used as a political weapon is beyond me, and Joseph Leopold must correct me if I do not read him aright. Meantime, I found costume worn naturally by persons to the manner born very good to look on I who up to now had only seen examples of the breeches, silk stockings, and short round jackets. The women of the hamlet upon the Frauenberg, on the other hand, about six miles away, wear costumes very much resembling those of the Boulogne fishwives of to-day ; and since they are descendants of Huguenot emigrants into Hessen-Cassel, it is obvious that their costume dates from at least before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The broad plain of Hessen-Cassel is everywhere diversified by pinnacles of basalt, upon each of which is planted a little town, varying in religion, in costume, and in habits. Roughly speaking, the Protestant villages, encouraged by the Prussian Government, wear costumes varying from the highly- coloured one of Amoneburg to the sombre black petticoat, black bodice and white stomacher, white stockings, black pumps with silver buckles, garters of green with long ends, and a particularly odd black head-dress in form exactly resembling a Phrygian cap which, when working in the fields, they replace by an immense straw hat, in shape like the chapeau de paille of Rubens. This latter costume is mostly found in the north of the Province, and assimilates fairly closely to that of the Biickerburgerinnen of the Grand Duchy of Lippe. This Grand Duke, like the Government of Prussia, encourages his subjects by every reasonable induce- ment, ranging to very substantial money prizes, to wear the national costume. Prussia has done the same thing in Alsace- Lorraine, the idea being everywhere identical namely, by means of the costume to encourage German national feeling. Roughly speaking, on the other hand, the villages whose population is Roman Catholic or considerably Jewish do not wear the costume, because these varieties of humanity have no particular reason to love Prussia. And for the same reason, there is comparatively little costume to be seen in the Grand Duchy of Hessen-Darmstadt and Bei Rhein. J. L. F. M. H. CH. ix] CHESTS AND COSTUMES 127 German peasant at fancy-dress balls in London, set amid policemen and pillar-boxes and cooks and gitdnos. Every plain, broad-featured girl of my acquaintance used to be advised by candid friends and relations to plait her hair or wear a switch, and go as Gretchen or a German peasant "So cheap and so easy, my dear !" Here in Marburg I was told that if I wished to see costume at its best, and plenty of it, I must go to the market on Saturday. The market was held, I understood, on the top of the hill ; I lived at the bottom. So one morning we mounted the high- flagged walk under a low wall, shaded by a row of trees, which is the main street of Marburg. It is a sort of three-decker of a street, with a cobbled causeway on one side and an unpaved way on the other. I felt as if I were walking on a stone battle- ment, raised in the midst of a tumbled watercourse. This raised footpath is comparatively new. How did passengers manage when the only way was a broad, unadjusted track leading up through the town to the Schloss and Palace on the top ? Even in the memory of Joseph Leopold the road up from the Elizabethen Kirche was once like a stony river- bed, not unlike the course of the Ilyssus at Athens after a drought. Somewhere about half-way up the hill the famous potters of Marburg used to sit and thump their wet clay. That was eighteen years ago, and now they have all taken their lathes elsewhere into side streets, where they have opened small shops. In the Marbacher Weg one can still see the wet discs that will be turned into bowls and dishes, and the 128 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. ix queer featureless knobs of clay that are really jugs drying on slats laid outside the shop-door. Inside, the potter is to be seen hard at work, sitting at his wheel, moulding on the sides of them the conven- tional figures of birds, flowers, and beasts he has roughly designed. If you are passing a day or two later, you can see the same pieces carried a stage further, with the brown glazes run on to them, and you can buy them. The designs on the clay are mostly the same as those that have been laid upon Marburg pottery for centuries, by this potter's ancestors probably. You can judge by the samples lying on the shelves of the Museum now. The pattern is there on the modern ones, but, curiously enough, the spirit seems to have departed. The design has survived, but it has thickened in the working, grown clumsier in the handling : it has lost dignity in the attempt at realism. The workman has grown meritoriously regardful of Nature, but I think that the stiffness of the conventional forget-me-nots was more adapted to the surface of a bowl, and a primrose by the cup's brink should not look as if a child had carried it in a hot hand all day. Perhaps far away in Eng- land, Ruskin and his disciples, brooding over slides of botanical specimens in the Tayleurian, were responsible for these sad acts of initiative on the part of a Marburg potter ? Beasts even modern beasts are more satisfac- tory. A large white stag before the setting sun standing bold in the centre of a yellow plate never can look wrong. I bought some ancient examples as curiosities; CH. ix] CHESTS AND COSTUMES 129 some modern ones of Herr Amendhausen for use and ornament. I then recklessly confided my pur- chase, numbering about thirty pieces, to the Marburg railway people. It was arranged that all of it was to be securely packed in a wooden case. Between Herr Amendhausen, who made the pottery and packed it, and the Speditor, who expedited it, most of it arrived in England broken. I have now two very large bones to pick with the Speditor, which I shall never pick, as he is safely sheltered by a railway company which takes no risks. The other bone is also a picking bone, but I am not at all sure the Speditor is to blame in the second case, since Joseph Leopold did actually get the compensation out of the vendor. I am reminded of both of these bones as I go up the main street of Marburg, past the Apotheke, where I buy my so expensive and so really good drugs past the cheap draper's shop with the Jewish name, whose windows are full of seemingly soft and woollen, but internally rotten and jerry-built, underclothing. Joseph Leopold is cold here and chilled to the liver, but he bears it. He'won't buy the Jew's goods, for he says you can't get worse in England. Then we go past the barber's and the Damen Frisiren place, where they once washed my hair and dried it so my sick fancy, bemused with hot and cold douches, pictures the scene by a process of winnowing. They seemed to be using flails, so violent were their measures. As I sat there, towelled, helpless, and ridiculous, I observed, under cover of my hair, that the barber's whole family came in and assisted at his labours. They waved palm-leaf fans at me, until, 9 i 3 o THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. ix like Job, my hair lifted off my forehead, and I was dry but afeard. We go past the two new houses they are building on a sort of frame of wooden cross-beams, quite irregular in shape, so that when the plaster is filled in the new may look as like the old house it replaces as possible. But I do not think that Germans are affected enough to care to build new rococo houses simply "for pretty," as they do in England, and in order to be in the forefront of the movement which likes to reproduce old features for the sake of chic. Certainly, if we saw such houses as these two of which I am speaking in process of building in the main street of a busy English market town among a good many modern ones, we should say, "This builder is a crank who wants to show how clever he is and how much he knows." I think Germans do it because they are opportunists always, and conservative when it suits them, and the old way of building in this case agrees with their domestic arrangements and their love of sleeping warm. Sleeping warm means ingle nooks and small low windows and the rest of it. Besides, roofs must be high-pitched for the storks that, like well-bred children, are heard but not seen, in Germany. I never saw any but those two in Wieseck. Then we came to and did not pass by for a long time the shop with " Landestragen " on the facia. For, piled up in the window, you can see all the materials needed to complete the dress of a peasant the man's Kittel, the woman's petticoats, cap, and bodice. The cap is made and ready to wear except for the strings ; and here are the handsome square- CIL ix] CHESTS AND COSTUMES 131 fringed neck-scarf, the rolls of patterned ribbon ready to be feather-stitched on to the hems, the bales of red, green, and blue, woollen stuff for the skirts, and the stamped velvet for the bodices. Who that has only seen the usually ridiculous ballroom figure, with pigtail plaited a la Marguerite, and draggled skirt not half short enough, that does not stick out, but clings to the silk-stockinged legs, can form any idea of the working reality ? For here it is. This shop is a miniature Whiteley, and there are shops like this in most towns where the thrifty German peasant, who feels herself in need of a new dress, can buy all her materials at once and hie her home to her distant farmstead and make it at her leisure. The materials are costly, but then she will not have any such new costumes in the course of her life, or she may have inherited one or two, as often happens. The caps, especially the very handsome seed-pearl embroidered ones, are frequently passed on as heirlooms. I have three now that were bought in that very shop and which, though good and solid, look as if they had been going for several hundred years. The petticoat is where the amateur goes wrong. The proper amount of skirts would be impossible to dance in ; and that is why the German peasant woman working in the fields discards all her petti- coats but the upper one on a hot day. I have seen a girl's defroque lying on the ground beside her reap- ing-hook and the pot of beer she has carried out to her husband. Or, if she is not actually affluent enough to possess more than one skirt, or perhaps two, she ekes it out with a sort of bolster worn i 3 2 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. ix round the hips, which sets out the garment as properly as if it were one of many, and procures her the indispensable freedom of movement neces- sary for working or dancing. No clinging woollen clogging their movement for them ! And perhaps it is this clever theory of toilette put into practice which permits of the fine, large, swinging gait with"which the German Bauern-Frau treads the furrows. It is this long stride which is absolutely characteristic of the walk of the working woman in Germany, and is so pronounced that it is patent to any casual observer from the window of a railway train. And talking of the rationale of costume, it strikes me that the make of the Hessian peasant's bodice and that of the present Swiss female costume and of the English, once embodies the very sound, if un- conscious, theory that the stiffer and solider parts of the clothing i.e., those intended to procure sup- port and warmth should be worn on the outside. The good old English word for corset suggests it, and the sense is exemplified in the use of that word for the wooden splats and laths which hold a vessel in process of construction together till it leaves its birthplace in the shipyard. Several nations seem to agree sartorially that this stay or support should be worn outside the shirt or shift. The French " to corser" i.e., stiffen, hold up from which they get the noun corset, holds the same notion. A curious reversion to this theory of toilette is sometimes carried out in the water at Dieppe. I observed one lady, whom everybody else observed, not on account of her costume, which was normal, CH. ix] CHESTS AND COSTUMES 133 but on account of her beauty, which was abnormal she was the late Miss Kitty Savile Clarke wearing, day after day, for her morning dip, a black satin stiffly-boned corset over her red maillot, and looking like a well-designed poster as she sat hanging her legs over the sides of the boat to which she had swum. I believe that it was practically only in the last century that the old process was reversed and what I will call woman's immense and vaunted " staying power" hidden underneath her softer exterior. She used to be a pomegranate, now she is a peach. To me the present fashion mendaciously suggests that natural resilience alone bears up this fraud that is woman. She is seeking thus to maintain an appear- ance of firm flesh underneath the soft bodice of silk or skilfully folded material. But he who has danced with the seemingly yielding fair is aware of the local stiffness that informs the shape he pilots by the flat of his palm round the ballroom. In fact, my partners have in confidence informed me that they would not have it otherwise, and that they find it easier to negotiate the varied contours of window-jamb and cornice and evade the thundering masses of human conglomerate that may bear down on the navigator, with " something solid to get hold of." But the modern Swiss bodice which still obtains, and the German one too, worn honestly outside, is a piece de resistance in more senses than one, for it is made to lace and not to fit. A girl may wear the bodice, which, slight and young, she could scarcely fill and a German Madchen, if you take her young enough, is sometimes as slender as any gazelle 134 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. ix until such time as she is a full-grown woman and can only adjust her corsage and exigencies with the aid of pins. And for a worker, the outside corselet has obvious advantages, such as have been acquired over here by the wearers of the kimono sleeve now come down to the slums. There is a style of dress in Germany adopted by the middle class which borrows from the peasant dress one principle, that of the independant sleeve. Inexperienced dressmakers must love the Reform Kleid, since it evades a ticklish bit of fitting known as "the under- arm seam." And although evolution has added a pair of sleeves to the corselet in Germany, the free- dom and play of the chest is still permitted, and I observe that the more slovenly type of German Madchen avails herself fully of the relief of missing hook and bursting buttonhole. The skirt is always made of woollen material, and nearly always the handy peasant woman weaves it herself, choosing her colours carefully. The upper skirt is generally of a very bright colour, the under-petticoats of a duller hue, unless, indeed, they happen to have been degraded from the rank of upper skirt to a more humble position. " Friend, go lower !" And if young women are partial to a strong, vivid green, I have noticed that the older ones prefer a soberish grey. But always there is the broad, bright border, composed of several rows of figured ribbon. These rows bring the trimming of such skirt fully two feet up from the bottom. The other day, turning out a drawer full of old things, I came upon several lengths of old silk English ribbon patterned very much as these German ribbons are, CH. ix] CHESTS AND COSTUMES 135 and so " good " as almost to be able to stand alone, like the satin dress of the elder Miss Browning of Cranford. The old-fashioned caps are set with coloured stones and embroidered with seed-pearls. Those new-fashioned that are for sale in the Marburg shop are less elaborate and a trifle tawdry. They are all small, not much larger than half an orange, and they are worn set carefully on the top of the knob of hair scraped up from the whole head, with wide strings of black ribbon with a picot border depending from them and flung back. The knob of hair 1 Sad to relate, that is generally all there is of it, at all events when the German peasant wife has reached the age of thirty. The Marguerite plait, if it ever existed, has been frightened away by the good soul's habit of intensive hair cultivation. From earliest youth she has strained it back* a la Pegotty, into the little tight knob I have been speaking of, so that it all goes quite comfortably into the circumference of a quarter pot. And pity 'tis, 'tis true ! . . . An English old maid of a hundred odd years in a cathedral town, " scrappy and hairless," according to the chivalrous saying, could boast of her scant locks as against the "having" of a happy and careless German peasant matron of thirty. The bodice of black or maroon or dark blue velvet * The costume of the Arlesienne, which dates quite definitely from the year 1840, includes a similar odd little cap perched on the top of the head, but such head-dresses these very beautiful women only wear upon Sundays and feast days, alleging that to wear them more often would ruin their hair. Thus once more do they seem to manage these things better in France. J. L. F. M. H. 136 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. ix stamped with a flowery pattern, and worn on holidays, or the other humbler one for work-days, made of printed cotton or linen, has a little berthe of quilling of self material all round the decolletage, which is, of course, never a decolletage at all. It is always filled in with the very clumsiest arrange- ment imaginable, a neckerchief of coloured silk or white linen, folded with some skill afresh every day. Round the column of the neck itself the fringed worsted or silk scarf of vivid hue is carelessly knotted, and the ends arranged to hang down the back. It is a curious arrangement for which one can discover no apparent artistic or hygienic reason. Coloured worsted stockings and shoes of felt with embroidered toes complete this costume, which I have observed chiefly at Marburg. Marburg is a Protestant place ; Catholics don't wear costume. And at Marburg sashes are worn, but I have not seen them in the shops for sale. I suppose they represent an individual fancy of the wearer. At the Kirchweih fetes and the Kermesses I have sometimes hovered round examples of these sashes, attracted by the extraordinary garish, clotted effect of the colours introduced into them. I have gone quite close to find out exactly the material used Berlin wools. I have never seen anything in the nature of decoration so vivid, so savage, so poison- ous-looking as these innocent toilette accessories worn by very young girls, and evidently made by hand, just as their English cousins made chair- covers and mats and tea-cosies out of the same stuff in the 'sixties ! In Germany, I suppose, fashions die harder. CH. ix] CHESTS AND COSTUMES 137 England took Berlin wool-work from Germany in the first instance. Ann Matilda and Georgina Maria slavishly adopted this mode along with their new Hanoverian rulers in 1714, and it died with Gladys and Phyllis and Muriel, who took on crewel work. That is dead again. Lotte and Gretchen, with whom Berlin wool-work originated, still wear their wool flowers gaily and on regions the other ladies never knew, for in England, I fancy, it was never used as a personal decoration. I am aware that the present fashion in Paris is for hats trimmed with wreaths composed of the Early Victorian symbol, and that breast knots of a single wool-work double dahlia with leaves to match are the rage, or have been. We bought some old hand-sewn embroidered linen tablecloths in the Landestragen shop to make bed- curtains with for an old English bed, and mounted farther into the heart of Marburg. There, among the little alleys, like dirty filaments, that wind in and out and up the steep monticules on which the town of Marburg is built, lives the great, the wicked Herr . He lives in a little court a court where Gretchen might have lived, and which Hawes Craven might have copied for Henry Irving. I wished to feast my eyes on the three good Truhen * which he * Truhen are, as a rule, the bride chests which accompany the Hessian bride from her father's house to her husband's upon the day of the wedding. Upon such an occasion these Truhen con- tain all the linen that will be used and all the costumes that will be worn by that bride during the remainder of her life. There should be costumes for the wedding, for church-goings, for mournings, for widowhood, and the shroud of burial. And the strictly orthodox bride should have spun or woven, at least with !38 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. ix possessed and was offering us for sale. We intended to show no eagerness, but to purchase them the day before departure. We meant to make him send them to us in England, where they would do us credit. In Germany only art nouveau goes down, and for our German house we had to furnish accordingly. It was with regard to this purchase that we again encountered the Speditor. But it was not the Speditor who cheated us this time. It was a clever old Jew who took an extra pound for packing the Truhen, and sent them all the way to Campden Hill with a bit of sacking lightly laid round their contours, as a woman drapes a handsome opera-cloak over her shoulders not so much to keep herself warm as to show off the beautiful lining of the cloak, and the beautiful bust it covers so ill. However, an equally clever German Rechtsanwalt, who was not a Jew, got us out of it. He took the matter into court, and forced Herr to disgorge the money we had given him for packing, and with it we paid for repair and dilapidations. The Rechtsanwalt's fee was only ten shillings. There are some advantages of being a German subject. And they were beautiful pieces of work, these Truhen. One of them came from the convent of Kloster Arnsburg, where the nuns had used it to keep their vestments. It has the Three Kings cut in low-relief on its sides, and thick pilasters to the the assistance of her mother, every single piece that the chest contains. Similarly, the chest of a nun was to be considered as her bridal chest, and to contain all the garments she will ever wear from the beginning of her novitiate to her burial. J. L. F. M. H. CH. ix] CHESTS AND COSTUMES 139 doors. Another, carved and inlaid (I may mention that it was this chest that suffered the worst from the evil effects of careless packing, for it arrived with all its inlays starting out of its head, and its painted figures blurred and damaged), is of a pale light wood, and has been painted at a later date. The third, the smallest and most mysterious of all, puzzled, and continued to puzzle, the greatest connoisseur in furniture in the world a man whose boast is that, show him only a square inch of any piece whatever, and he will engage to tell you its nature, make, and provenance. In this chest, decorated with stags and horses and plants of a curious convention resembling the hieratic lotus flower, Joseph Leopold keeps his suits, with great inconvenience but immense artistic satisfaction. We passed on, and found the market-place at last. It is situated on a level plateau, and closed in from the view of the valley of the Lahn on three sides by houses, and on the fourth by an old town-hall. Flowers in window-boxes are on the sill of every window of this otherwise austere-looking building, and the houses are all painted. I have never been in Italy, but I fancy that the painted houses, the costumed women, and the natural hues of fruit and flowers, altogether made up such a blaze of colour as Italy could not exceed, though she might equal. At any rate, I am not aware that houses in Italy are notched, faceted, and blazoned in stripes and dots in all the strongest primary colours. And imagine what it is to have flashed on you all at once a bed of hydrangeas, calceolarias, nemophilas, nasturtiums, and gladioli, peonies, dahlias, fuchsias, i 4 o THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. ix begonias and pelargoniums heated, irritable, passionate flowers with these sort of Latin termina- tions rush to one's mind at once and you may have an idea of this German market-place on that sunny day in mid-September. Of all the flowers named in my list, none, I think, were actually present except the gladioli, and there were a great many of these. And then there were the costumes and the women's cheeks, and green, very green, cabbages, and the most golden pumpkins, and extremely purple plums, and deeply-tinged apples. There were also the clear, translucent shades of yellow cheeses, and tubs of milky curds, and kegs of butter good German butter, very white, like Castile soap. That is as it should be. It takes you some months of en menage to realize that it isn't your husband's shaving-soap which has got on to the breakfast-table by mistake. The awnings of the stalls, too, were gaily striped, and laughing, higgling men and women passed to and fro under them. Everybody was selling 3nd everybody buying at the same time, which seems an eminently satisfactory arrangement. Nobody stayed in one place long except perhaps a few old, very old, women, immovably fixed behind a tub of butter or curds, and with a round umbrella stretched over them. Sometimes one of them, when she had done good business sold a whole kegful, perhaps rose and pattered away slowly into the church hard by to mutter a grateful orison, and so back again to the silent session among all the noise. CHAPTER X WAITERS AND POLICEMEN I HAVE known many waiters, German, and not otherwise, but I have never known a waiter like Le bel Ernst. " Mais c'est de la folie !" Joseph Leopold used to exclaim when he heard me expatia- ting, in season and out of season, on the monumental virtues of this young man. I will try to describe him. Of the images conjured up by the word " waiter," Ernst possesses only one attribute ; he is German. A waiter who is not German is superhuman unless he is Swiss, and all waiters are slavish, seedy, sycophantish, anaemic, impertinent, and indifferent. Ernst cannot be thus described. Firm - fleshed, stout, but not fat, he is positively handsome in a blonde, Napoleonic way, with a chest and a stomach like a soldier's that is to say, decently and becom- ingly bombe under his white apron of service, not servitude. This is the best physical description I can give of the life and soul and may I add of the stomach ? of the R Hotel in Marburg. Of course, his erect carriage might be attributed to the fact that he has served ; but then, German waiters in England who cringe and fawn and poke have presumably also served their country for a span. 141 i 4 2 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. x And the anaemia of the English variety is supposed to be the result of the conditions, so unfavourable to digestion, of life in the restaurant the hurried meals, the close atmosphere. But who that had seen Ernst snatch a hasty mouthful halfway through his labours of the evening meal would doubt if he him- self took these conditions into consideration at all ? We used to see him, when he thought there was time, or might possibly be time a poor three minutes or so settle himself at one of the tables, fetch a plateful from the buttery hatch and begin to stoke, with one eye on the favoured customer and the other on the Saal in general. After three mouthfuls or so the urgent, wanton call would come, and Ernst would rise calmly and attend any felt want, and as easily subside into his place again, eat some more, to rise again at least five times before his immediate hunger could possibly be satisfied. I have never seen anything in England like the machine-like efficiency of this firm piece of flesh and blood. I was never tired of setting it in motion and watching the ensuing steady roll across the Speisesaal. I admired the sweep of the arm, the indicative flourish with which he pointed out the table where he and the management would prefer one to sit, and the adroitness with which he effected the removal of soiled napkins and out- worn dishes ; his eye, bright, small, and universally bestowed ; his firm white hands that deposited the dish one had asked for, and none other, in front of one, on the really clean white table-cloth. I remember the first time I saw him. Weary and dejected, we had both flung ourselves on to a CH. x] WAITERS AND POLICEMEN 143 red plush-covered settee in front of a table that seemed to us the most likely and pleasant, and beckoned condescendingly to the Lohengrin - like figure that hovered if anything so solid could be said to hover in the dim penumbra of the unlighted part of the Speisesaal near the door, where stag's antlers, with heavy coats hung upon them, rendered the wall one sheet of mysterious blackness. Close to the white figure outlined thereon was the bar, where glancing brass levers functioned and bottles of liqueurs, with their varie- gated labels bearing names of awe, stood about, handled by a forbidding-looking female who bore no sort of affinity to their vicious and decadent contents. Behind this angular female, a more opulently con- toured variety of the sex seemed to be continually surging in from the kitchen behind. There were steaming, beetle-browed women, bearing plates that seemed heavy, and which they slammed down as if they were very hot, in front of the austerer Hebe who manipulated the levers and poured out the foaming Bocks that were to wash down the viands. There Lohengrin stood, while Elsa and Ortrud functioned appropriately under his direction. Majestically he commanded and never spoke. Le bel Ernst, for this was he, began his ministra- tions on our behalf by politely heading us off the Stammtisch, where it would have been death to us to presume to sit, and then, like an ambulant, hardly animated, penny-in-the-slot machine, complaisantly but not slavishly, he took our order. He was a trifle austere at first, for he did not know us, but even later on I cannot say he smiled. He did not, at any 144 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. x rate, smile with his lips an American might have said that he smiled a very little all over. At any rate, we were just able to infer that he liked us. Of course there are no waiters like Ernst in England, and the reason is obvious. Ernst had no desire to learn English, for he can do very well without it. England only gets the inferior artist, who thinks to raise his salary by the acquiring of this merely meretricious advantage. Ernst, on the face of him, needs none of these adventitious aids to success ; he manages quite well without talking anybody's language at all. We fell across quite another variety of the German waiter at home at Trier. The good, dear, nervous soul spoke all languages, but was conversant with none. He had been in England, and he detected the trace of the alien in me at once. One evening we were going to be out late and we started early I left the task of ordering dinner to him. "Trust me, Madame, you shall have a dinner all right !" he had wagged his head and said. And when, weary with our long day, riding in a train all the way up the Mosel to Cochem, we came in and sat down lumpishly, and called for our mess, it proved the worst dinner we had ever struck in all our days. Impossible fish, swimming in water that had not been adequately drained, tasteless chops, unredeemed by garlic or onion, a pudding yes, a pudding of rice and jam, and oh, I cannot tell ! " You don't eat ?" he remarked, bitterly chagrined. "And I had ordered such a nice little dinner for you, one I thought you would like. All English cuisine a feau " CH. x] WAITERS AND POLICEMEN 145 We explained very softly, for we were not leaving just yet, that we weren't English, didn't want to be English, would have hated English cookery even if we had been English. Poor dear ! He was not angry, but saddened and depressed for the remainder of our stay. He wore no nice white apron tied round his middle like Le bel Ernst. Only the wretched swallow-tailed bastard evening dress of usage. I have never, I believe, seen Ernst without his eternal apron, with the delicate tape-strings tied carefully round his waist, as it were, " pour dessiner un peu la taille." No, I am forgetting; I saw Ernst once in mufti, and it was on a Sunday. Coming round the corner from Marchesi's, a sailor hat was taken off to me, not flourished, and I received a smart bow and muttered salutation from a blue- serge-clad youth with a jaunty stick in his hand, which warned me to say my obligatory " Tag !" and look at the holiday face and get-up of the Light of the Speisesaal. Ernst knew what every waiter ought to know and never does, or else he knows it incorrectly, and that is the times of trains and buses, and the best way to use the modes of transit obtaining in the district in which one happens to be. He was able to tell us where to go for tea, or where to walk, and where to buy an English newspaper, and what day the cinematograph treated its patrons to a change of programme, a matter of the first impor- tance to Joseph Leopold. He even took upon him- self the duty of telling us when to look out of the window. We happened to be at Marburg on Sedan Day. 10 146 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. x English people have no idea what an important day that is in Germany ; at least, English people who have not toiled up the vine-clad slopes above Riide- sheim to the Denkmal, the immense memorial Germany raised to its dead of the Franco-Prussian War. On a pouring wet day the whole Town Council of Marburg turned out in tail coats and top hats, and with white scarves round their middles, and went in procession up the narrow main streets. All the students' corps went too, and many cos- tumed persons belonging to the old custom-ridden town. It was a long, long business, and before they had all passed out of sight our breakfast was quite cold. The festivities lasted all day and well into the evening. The procession passed again just after dusk, and this time the little boys were furnished with coloured Chinese lanterns. Past our windows they went again, and up the steep main street right through the town to the Schloss on top. They looked like an army of great pink toadstools, as they climbed and were lost to view. We followed, and took our after-dinner coffee as usual at Marchesi's, so as to see a little more of them. There are a great many cafes in Marburg, but Marchesi's is the more popular. Out of the dim, ill-lighted street one passes inta a covered way leading to a bar, and then further to a room, with a large stove in the middle, dotted with little tables where women and men sit drinking coffee, and beer, and syrups and grenadines, and eating large slabs of indigestible cake. For their souls' enter- tainment they read the daily papers, glance at the CH. x] WAITERS AND POLICEMEN 147 illustrated ones, and play dominoes or knit. We passed through that room on to the veranda open to the night. This veranda is perched on a dizzy height, and seems to project far over the back street of the town. One looks down on to the River Lahn. It reminded me of the view from one of the Canon's houses on to the Banks at Durham. Marburg often does remind me of my native city ; it has just such another embattled situation. We took up our places in the balcony, and our legs and the ferules of our umbrellas got wound up with the spokes of the railing balusters. Then we ordered ices and coffee. After-dinner coffee at a restaurant in Germany is always served with the accompaniment of a small squat glass of water, with a spoon laid formally across it. " Why ?" I ask Joseph Leopold. " In order that you may sanitarily dip your spoon into the water before you use it in your coffee," he replies. Then he gets hold of " Simplicissimus " as usual, and reads me the jokes, translating when necessary, and it is mostly necessary. We amuse ourselves by trying to see where the joke comes in. We hardly hope to be amused with the joke itself. With a good deal of bonne volonte we sometimes are able to perceive a gleam of humour only a gleam. But there is always plenty of savage spite against the Kaiser, and indecencies a propos of this great personage far more serious than those slanderous suggestions with regard to King Edward which, exhibited once on a Paris Kiosk, were so deeply resented by England. His subjects relish this sort of thing, and the Kaiser does not care to spoil their fun. 148 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. x So it is tacitly agreed that he is to be fair game, though " high " game, it seems to me, in more senses than one, for Joseph Leopold does not think of translating some of these poems to me. . . . Then we go home again by the low way that is to say, by the road which we had been looking down on from Marchesi's balcony. The streets that part from it at right angles to scale the hill are like staircases, so steep are they. We have to make a loop to go down. We go past the great fortress- like houses, closed and unlit the inhabitants are all out at the civic merry-making and the spectac- ular Great Dane usually waits at the door, crouched under the carven porch until his master shall return and take him in to the house with his wife and his children and everything else that is his. On the doorstep of a house tenanted by folk of inferior social standing who did not run to a guardian Great Dane, we noticed a little patient girl sitting with a baby in her arms. The small, unlit window of the house behind her seemed to be crammed with articles of a confused description. By day it was probably an unromantic hovel, but by night it was weird and mysterious, like the house where Gretchen lived with her mother until Faust came. The child looked very forlorn, and we asked why she did not take the baby into the house and warm it. She replied that her mother had gone out and put the key in her pocket. " What a cruel mother I" I said to Joseph Leopold. "Not at all. The whole family went out on the spree, and the mother probably sent the child on home because it was getting late. The contents of CH. x] WAITERS AND POLICEMEN 149 the shop are too valuable to be left at the mercy of a key in the hands of a child. And it is a warm night. Don't be so ready with your sympathy in Germany." " But what about the police, with their excellent dogs you tell me about ?" I asked, pertinaciously. The German police are not allowed to carry arms any more than the English,* but they are given better support than a truncheon. The trained dog, which they are privileged to take about with them, is a far more efficient weapon of defence and attack. Though they cannot in the heat of argument reck- lessly "draw" or "fire" it, the dog won't stand by and see his master attacked. He is trained to wait to "go" for the assailant until that pass has been reached. Then, I am told, there is no need, as there is so often in England, for some plucky woman to rush into the melee and blow the whistle depending from the neck of the helpless guardian of the law the dog is quite equal to his work. He is not exactly savage, but he is not to be petted by any chance stranger when he is out on business. It took me it takes me a long time to realize that, for I always want to talk to animals when I meet * This is nonsense. The German police carry swords, revolvers, carbines, knuckle-dusters, bludgeons, and any lethal weapon that may occur to the individual fancy of the Police Minister of that particular State, and the reason why that door was so carefully locked was that although you could trust almost every lay in- habitant of almost every German city or village, you stand in deadly fear of the policeman, who, if he does not rob and murder you, will certainly subject you to blackmail if he gets a chance of getting hold of your papers. The police dogs are generally under the control of members of a more intelligent and trustworthy " surety " force, who are less armed and much less disastrous to have in the house. J. L. F. M. H. ISO THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. x them, but these police dogs are not inviting, though I believe people do buy them and take them to their hearths and homes in England. And by a succession of steep gradients we at last come to the low, level road, and look up and see the light shining through Marchesi's balcony, the frail projection where we had, only half an hour ago, been sitting and supping our coffee. I began : " Why don't they " That warm autumn night, when young blood was probably excited by the fete-day, we heard a serenade. It happened to be sung under our windows, but was addressed to the young wife of the son of Philipp Schor, the Kalbfleischer's over the way, newly married that very morning. On the rough cobblestones, under the pale star- light, a little choir of six sang carefully, without wildness or enthusiasm, but with a grave and touching earnestness, three-part songs of an epi- thalamic character. They must have known the parts by heart, for they had no light except a tiny lantern, slung on a stick, to illuminate the score of the conductor. The songs were so sweet, so serious, so dignified in their dreaming cadences that we two, hanging stilly over our window-bars, wished the concert would go on all night, to the accompaniment of the quiet chime from the tower of the Elizabethen Kirche. But no ; the three songs were duly sung through, and there were no encores permitted. We outsiders did not dare to offer our thanks, and none came from the windows, gratefully flung open, of the bridal chamber. Soon, in silence and soft unison, as they had chanted, the six songsters CH. x] WAITERS AND POLICEMEN 151 departed, and the pit-a-pat of their felt-shod feet sounded faintly, and then not at all, on the cobble- stones. The window opposite was gently closed trust a German to dread the night air, even on his wedding night ! CHAPTER XI A LANDGRAFIN AND HER CONFESSOR WE solemnly "did" Marburg. The English mother of Joseph Leopold wished it. I always defer " doing " on principle ; I prefer to let the spirit of a place sink well in before inspecting the monu- ments. One should happen on monuments, one should have an opportunity to stare long at their outsides before entering. And even on the footing of a mere tourist, is there any holier joy than to walk forth with faith and without a guide-book ? Picking one's way among the garbage, the horrible every-day detritus of no particular street of the city you are living in, one comes suddenly upon some lovely flower of the Middle Ages, some gem of architecture, in a vile setting of hovels and flaunting shop signs ! One realizes that it is a relic of value ; one has the pleasant sensation of having been slightly beforehand with the guide-book which one consults as soon as one gets home. Guide-books are strangely fallacious. But the first monument you see on issuing from the railway-station at Marburg itself a thing of beauty is the Elizabethen Kirche, with its two tall towers. If I had not known that it was the Eliza- 152 CH. xi] LANDGRAFIN AND CONFESSOR 153 bethen Kirche, I might have neglected this famous church that St. Elizabeth built and gave to Catholics, and that Protestants stole. ... I may mention that I am never allowed to see a church purely as an archaeologist, or even as a student of architecture, which I am not. It is one of the circumstances of my case that the Church Militant view faces my own patient lack of interest on any other ground than artistic and historical ones. That great tourney of extermination of vested interests which was the Reformation is Joseph Leopold's sore point, and also his strong one as far as argument goes. It does add a distinct piment to travelling to go round churches with a person who chooses to regard them all as hostages, grabbed from one side by another side, returned under treaty by that side, destroyed, rebuilt, and returned again, according as dynasties flourished or fell all over the world. And, in the deplorable main, the hostages have remained in the hands of the unbelievers. " Yes, you took it from us 1" is the phrase most often on Joseph Leopold's tongue, as my respectful so-called Protestant feet pad along after the staid, dour sacristan, treading on sacred flags that lead to the despoiled altar and to the arch over which the figure on the rood once bowed. And, indeed, as far as the Elizabethen Kirche is concerned, it is a shabby story for " Prots " to hear. Those two tall towers of St. Elizabeth's don't look a day older to me than, say, one of the colleges that, on the " Backs " at Cambridge, brood over the smug, sullen waters with such a smart Tennysonian air of "ancient peace." It is the kind of stone used 154 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xi in both German and English buildings which gives my ignorance that impression, and the fact that this is a living church, and, one way or another, has been steadily kept in repair. It does not look old enough to have been the scene (was it not the scene ?) of Everybody's Great Picture ? pictures, mostly by R.A.'s, of which reproductions glare from over the mantelpiece of every inn parlour in England. One masterpiece greeted me on my return from Marburg, swelling proudly on the walls of the Tate Gallery. Fresh from services in the Eliza- bethen Kirche, I stood and looked at the decorous nude figure kneeling before the altar of the chapel, while the stern priest, her confessor, stands behind her, with the scourge in his hand. Daily he bruised and flagellated his royal penitent, and the people of Marburg were more scandalized than edified. Conrad of Marburg, the Dominican monk who had contrived to get possession of the body and soul of the Princess of Hungary, seems to me a thoroughly Irvingesque figure. Yet the great man never impersonated him. The story is curious and touching, compounded as it is of dim religious superstition and poetry. As the Landgrave of Thuringia sat in his castle of the Wartburg among his Minnesingers, there came to him a renowned poet and magician, Klingsor von Hunderland. The magician announced to the Landgrave that that very night a child should be born the destined consort of his son Louis. Her mother was Gertrude von Meran, the sister of St. Hedwig, and her father was King Andreas of Hungary. And this child was to be a saint, like CH. xi] LANDGRAFIN AND CONFESSOR 155 her aunt. The Landgrave lost no time, but sent messengers to demand the baby's hand in marriage for his son. And the daughter of the King of Hungary it shows what important and powerful people the German Landgraves were was instantly rendered up, and carried in a silver cradle to the Wartburg, where she was brought up with her prospective bridegroom, and in due course became his wife. She gave him, an ordinary unsaintly man, a great deal of trouble. The priest who domineered over her all her days, and who procured her saintship, began his teaching early ; he made her a fanatic like himself. She gave all she had to the poor, and when her husband objected she managed to prose- cute her charities in secret, and the supernatural powers connived. We all know the story of the loaves of bread that she was carrying in her apron when surprised by her husband, and how they were transmogrified, as he peered to see and convict her of charity, into flowers. But, as one chronicler says, " she bestowed her alms without distinction," so when the tide of her fortunes turned, and she was reduced to begging for bread for herself and her child at Eisenach, she was rudely entreated nay, thrown down in the mud by one of the very beggars she had benefited in her proud time. While the power of the Dominican monk lasted she was supreme. He was secretly supported by the Pope, and, usurping the office of heretical judge, arraigned citizens and petty nobility before his tribunal. It was not until he made an attack on the high nobility in the person of the Count von Solms, 156 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xi that that important personage rebelled, went to the Diet at Mayence, proved his innocence of the charges brought against him, and demanded repara- tion for his insulted honour. One of the Arch- bishops he of Treves spoke for him. The King granted him what he asked, and gave over the monk to popular vengeance. Elizabeth was dead, and not even her sanctity could save him. But what power had been his through the queenly woman he had terrorized! Joseph Leopold will not like me to say this. But, on the other hand, I do not like to think of the midnight scourgings and the want of taste shown by the Catholic victim. She exhibited the wounds she had allowed Conrad to inflict upon her body, saying proudly : " Behold the caresses of my confessor 1" Is not that speech, in its simple, serious raillery, typical of the whole social mind of the Middle Ages ? But Joseph Leopold doesn't think St. Elizabeth a silly woman at all, and he finds it quite natural that the benefited beggarwoman should turn and throw her benefactress into the mud ; that, to him, seems perfectly natural. He has no high opinion of human nature, but wants to do all he can for it. But to do good without respect of persons has always seemed to me a useless philanthropy. Joseph Leopold has it against me that in the old days of the " growler," driven by the sour man in many capes, I was twice summoned in one week for the extra sixpence. I have always contended that the second summons was a put-up job, and that two cabmen had laid their heads together, for when the distance was measured, in the one case I was found to be strictly CH. xi] LANDGRAFIN AND CONFESSOR 157 within my rights. I paid both claims. One summons was to be attended on Boxing Day, when I was away, and the other in a distant court at Camber- well. Rated by a friend for my over-strict inter- pretation of the proper fare " Why not pay the poor beggar? The extra sixpence makes him happy " I replied, with the insouciance of youth, " It's all very well, but I didn't come into the world to make cabmen happy !" St. Elizabeth evidently did, as regards cabmen and their like, and great was her fame. There stand the two tall towers of her church to bear testimony to her scourgings, her fortitudes, her bitterness, and the nullity of her rewards on this earth. But no one thinks of the Landgrave and his domestic happiness, destroyed because his wife preferred the sanguinary caresses of her confessor to his I No one worries about him, but her shrine is beautiful and was gorgeous, and her church was worth the robbing by Protestants. It is whitewashed now inside, and all mural paintings are obscured, but there are one or two fine triptychs representing her. And finally, having drunk the Protestant cup of bitterness to the dregs at Joseph Leopold's hands, we took a landau and prepared to mount to the top to see a famous piece of paper the very piece of parchment that set loose this scourge of Protestantism on a Catholic world Luther's Protest. We creaked up it took us a good hour from the Elizabethen Kirche to the platz, or castle garden, a level platform next the Schloss. Two or three effete- looking guns were planted in telling encoignures, set in little stunted wild-currant bushes. This used to 158 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xi be the garden of the castle, where the lords thereof could walk abroad as we did, and stretch their legs, and survey the River Lahn many feet below, wind- ing, like a silver ribbon, alongside the railway-line, a jet-black one nearly parallel. At least, that is what we saw, and for the rest the view must have been much the same. I was exhausted, as one who has mounted a mountain by the aid of a rack and pinion railway. And the clumsy, old-fashioned landau waited for us, and we found a custodian, and he rattled the customary keys and looked as if he disliked being disturbed. He let us into the large Ritter Saal with the painted ceiling, with the immense fireplace, and the wide window-seats cut in the thickness of the wall. The usual suits of armour, made presumably for dwarfs, were standing about. We went through this hall up a flight of stone stairs, and were ushered into a large room above fitted with glass cases containing sheets of parchment written in crabbed characters the hand- writing used in Shakespeare's three authentic signatures, which are actually written in German characters and with great fat seals as big, nay, in some cases bigger, than themselves, depending from them by unpleasant-looking strings. These Bullae represent the Papal Bulls that used to puzzle the child mind so much in the pages of Mrs. Mark- ham. There they are, many and many of them small bits of discoloured parchment that were once received by Kings and Princes, and meant ruin to them and theirs often enough. It is " Prots," at any rate, who have done away with that. And there I came into collision with the views of Joseph Leopold CH.XI] LANDGRAFIN AND CONFESSOR 159 again, and for the next five minutes went modestly hither and thither, saying nothing, but peeping into this case and that case, and listening to his instruction. I saw the original of the famous sign-manual of Charlemagne, the four-forked cross like the top of the hilt of a medieval sword that used to hold my childish eyes, ever on the lookout for the concrete image, at the top of one of Mrs. Markham's vivacious chapters. How ineffably childish my interest, com- pounded more of association than knowledge, must have seemed to the student who had ferreted out his facts for himself in many hours of patient poring over originals ! And then there came suddenly the unpretending signature of Martin Luther, and the warrant that gave Protestantism to the world ! Even Joseph Leopold, whose historical interest goes side by side with his religious fervour, could not resist pointing out to me the brave up and down strokes of Luther, Zwingli, Martin Bucer, and the rest of the men who lit this candle by whose beams we in England walked at least a little way. When I was a child I was made to read aloud in the evenings out of a tiny Elzevir volume, the first volume of Robertson's " History of Charles the Fifth." And in the day-time I was also going through my first term at a High School. One morning towards the end of term time we were set to write an original composition in one hour from starting a sufficient task for a schoolgirl of ten or eleven. Our subject was the life of a hero any hero. And on the spur of the moment, and the terrible clock hanging just over my head, I chose 160 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH^ xi for my hero Martin Luther. It was because I had, the night before, read as far as the lively scene of Luther's interposition with regard to the selling of indulgences by the villainous Friar Tetzel. These are, of course, Robertson's characterizations. This was as far as I had gone in the volume. After scribbling away with a full pen for three-quarters of an hour I had nothing more to write about. I knew no more about Luther. ... So after I had nibbled my pen frantically for twenty minutes, the clock-face frightened me, and I closed a very minute and detailed account of the Reformer's earliest years up to the Tetzel incident, with this sentence, a mirth-provoking family heirloom : " Luther was never brought to justice, but died on his bed. . . ." This schoolgirl ineptitude ought not to have occurred to me in this connection, nor surely ought I to have fondly related it to Joseph Leopold or, at any rate, not within these walls. He was walking about in a state of ecstasy becoming rather to his calling of historical novelist than to his severe religious views. " There," he was saying to his mother " there, that is what I have brought you to see. The Protest of Zwingli, Luther, and Bucer. That bit of paper is Protestantism. It all began with the signing of that bit of paper." And turning to me : " That is what you mean when you say you are a Protestant !" " But I don't say it," I remarked helplessly, as so many times before. " I even deny it." Useless ! A " Prot " I am, and seemingly must remain so in the eyes of this black Papist. CHAPTER XII LIONS AND LACE CURTAINS THERE was an old municipal-featured gentleman in the train going to Hildesheim, and I asked him if he could tell us of a good hotel there. For once Joseph Leopold and I were not " en pays de connais- sance." We had got a fit of visiting places strange to us both. He thought and thought, finally he warmed to the subject, and recommended the E Hof. It was late. I was tired. Joseph Leopold had a potential wrangle about the luggage in prospect, and so I went out alone and took rooms. Across the dreary modern-looking station enclosure I saw hospitable lights quivering, and by night I could not tell that there were horrible lace curtains to the coffee-room window, stained yellow, like the coffee- coloured laces worn years ago by the aesthetes. These curtains were looped into bands of old gold, dating back to the same artistic period. And yellow lace curtains now and henceforth spell for me the abomination of desolation in the way of hotels, and if ever I see this insignia of horror I give the place of entertainment that is foolish enough to advertise it a very wide berth. I have come to know since that E Hofs all over Germany flaunt it ; E 161 II 162 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xn Hofs seems to be the generic name for hotels of this stamp. That old gentleman in the train going to Hildesheim must have been animated by some strong esprit de corps ; perhaps he was the chairman of the committee of The Gordon I mean the E Hofs Ltd. ? I know not, but I have never forgiven him. We dined abominably in a varnished deal-match- boarding dining-room, and after dinner, all in the dark, we walked out and took a tram away from the station neighbourhood right into the heart of Hildesheim. The tram passed through a long lighted street, set with shops on either side handsome shops with large inviting facias that flashed invitation to us across the dark they illuminated. And at last, in a ghostly, ill-lighted Platz, we dismounted, and there we were in the Middle Ages ! Towering cathedral spires seemed to loom over us, painted eaves and cornices to tickle our ears as we wandered along, entranced, from ghostly Platz to ghostly Platz, accompanied by the sound of bells from the many church steeples whose but- tresses varied the uneven house-line. It seemed as if, once past that tram-bestridden and glass-faced main street, every house in Hildesheim was painted and gargoyled and initialled with its owner's family name and the date of its building, far back in the sixteenth century. And, still in the dark, we came to a low, shiny, oaken doorway, humble, unob- trusive, suggestive of good entertainment, of brown- ing for gravies and of glazed hams, and the smoke of many flambeaux held under the archway of its CH. xn] LIONS AND LACE CURTAINS 163 entrance the porch of the Wiener Hof. Over the doorway, all across the facade, interrupted only by the principal windows of the principal rooms, the legend of Europa and the Bull was carved and painted and blazoned. Peering under the blinds of the Speisesaal we could see the officers sitting at their meat, the points of their swords clumsily resting on the ground beside their chairs. We could see that the room where they were was dimly lighted, but enough that there were carved stalls and stags' antlers on the walls, to be used as prongs to hang the hats and coats on. And Joseph Leopold swore that what these connoisseurs were eating was little crabs stewed in wine. He ordered me to go in, use my newly-acquired German, and engage rooms at once for to-morrow. I did. I entered a hall, not very large, with an uneven very uneven floor, and no gilding. An old family-looking butler came forward to meet me, and showed me two rooms at six marks each, in- cluding breakfast. Breakfast was in the breakfast-room downstairs, as the Wiener Hof understands breakfast. It was the right kind of breakfast several sorts of rolls, good butter, and good jams, and best of all, though not for everyone, goose-grease to spread on those rolls. A great many Germans take Ganse-fett for breakfast ; it is the best thing for your health in the world. But, as I said before, not for everyone. Then we had Mittag Essen, the German midday meal, and the important one of the day. That is one of the difficulties for aliens when in Germany aliens whose habits are corrupted by English and 164 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xn French late dining. The only thing to do is to steal a plat or so from the lunch and put it in the dinner or Abend-essen. This rule is useful, of course, in eating-places where there is a set menu and you take it. If you dine a la carte and at the Wiener Hof they preferred you to dine a la carte it is different ; you get what and as much as you like. Do English people know what a really good Aufschnitt is ? There is everything in the world in it. You do not have to dig for discoveries ; everything is fairly set out on a large flat dish ; the trouble is that it takes you quite a long time to overlook it all. There are sure to be some slices of ham and some slices of veal. I am never surprised if I meet beef or tongue. In the middle there is certainly a piece de resistance, a cockle-shell full of the gem of all, Haring Salat. Round the rim are slices of all sorts of sausage Leber Wurst of cheese ; little heaps of caviare and chopped beetroot, gherkins and capers. And all this diversion, this plethora of interest, for one mark fifty ! I have tasted a maimed Aufschnitt a faint reminder of this gorgeous dish at a place in London ; but how far away it is from the stability, the certainty, of the German inn's catering ! Enough of this. I shall be called greedy. And I think I am. I have taken to German cookery as no alien could ever have hoped to do. I care nothing for what my grandfather probably called French "kickshaws" all grandfathers did. I detest the eternal omelette of France, the eternal pommes f rites, the same good sauce I don't say it isn't good dis- posed over everything. CH. xn] LIONS AND LACE CURTAINS 165 Dinner that night, though not perhaps a dream, was at any rate a charming reality. And next morning, before we were properly awake, a deep bell tolled, and we were told by the solemn butler that one of the canons of Hildesheim had died and that his funeral sermon was to be preached that day by his fellow Canon and confrere in the famous abbey church of Hildesheim. I knew I was going to be narrowed, for Church ceremonies always do harrow me, and this one would surely be performed with much unction, for the Canon who lay under the eleven-yard-wide black pall was deeply beloved. I dressed myself as soberly as a traveller could compass, and Joseph Leopold and I went in and took our places in the solemn, black-draped church under the circular candelabra set with jewelled emblems and enamelled discs which Bishop Hezilo gave to Hildesheim. In front of the altar stood the quite plain and prehistoric porphyry pillar that people come miles to see. It was not always placed inside the church, and some say that such a pagan emblem has no business there. Kneeling black crowds bent all round us, and together we all wallowed in woe and wept for an old gentleman whom I had never seen. Like a thunderstorm, with terrible lueurs and sullen boomings, the Dies Irce resounded through the aisles. I can never stand the Dies Irce I mean without crying. And, moreover, there were impres- sive circumstances about this funeral. The defunct priest was adored by his colleagues ; a personal friend pronounced the eulogy, and broke down midway in 166 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xn sobs and tears, so that the rest of his discourse could hardly be heard. Afterwards we were shown the treasury of Hilde- sheim. I grew bewildered with the luxuriance of jewelled croziers and mitres, faint with desire for flagons and chalices set with gems that winked and coruscated, safe from me in their velvet cases. Alas! all that coruscated was not a gem of the purest ray ; glass had taken the place of the rubies and emeralds which had made the treasury of Hildesheim the centre of the desires of greedy con- tending potentates. Then we went into the sacristy, where treasure of another sort is gathered. I am a little jarred by the sight of bones with their ugly, suggestive articulated ends swathed in blue velvet and tinsel, and of microscopic Kreuz Artikel in pretentious jewelled and velvet cases, looking like ravaged birds' nests, and tiny skulls of martyrs, whose size does credit to the heart of the owners rather than to their intellects. But after all, believers must have something to take hold of, and, indeed, these fibulas of St. Tiburga, these thigh-bones of St. Remigius, have seen much service and submitted to much handling. Every Catholic church in Germany possesses a due amount of them, and at least one chasse studded with holes where the jewels used to be. The sight saddens me. Yet I once trafficked in a relic, and sent attested portions away to my Catholic friends. They were unclassifiable portions of the rotten wood which had formed part of the coffin of St. Cuthbert of Durham, sweepings of the floor unconsidered morsels, from the point of view of the antiquaries who were CH. xn] LIONS AND LACE CURTAINS 167 collating them. Still they seemed very considerable to Father Michael in Paris, to whom I sent a little piece as big as would lie on a sixpence and which he accepted, with the attestation of a Canon of Durham, for his church. Why not ? It had been part of the coffin of an English saint who died and was buried in Lindisfarne in Northumberland in the first century, was carried by devout monks to Durham, where his shrine formed one of the wonders of the British Isles. And many of the queer little oddments enshrined in glass cases in this sacristy at Hildesheim, and others at Limburg and Marburg, are no more important or bulky, and less authentic, though they have had gorgeous caskets made for them and have been treasured for centuries. My patient, slightly aloof, humble, yet uncon- sciously sceptical attitude in the face of such valuable trifles always annoys Joseph Leopold, and we never make a very long stay in these emporia of holy material. We got outside and walked about in the garden which has grown up in the ruins of the cloisters, and looked at the Holy Rose of Hildesheim, which is one thousand years old, was planted by Charlemagne, and still grows and blows. The bush we see is a sucker of the original tree, and it is tended most scrupulously by a service of four gardeners. And in the evening we went to the circus. It was like the country circus one reads of in old English novels, with lions and ladies and tigers and tamers. In a Platz, behind the Wiener Hof, an enormous tent had been erected a tent 168 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xn whose ceiling sagged and drooped and was very ill lit, thus producing all sorts of beautiful Rembrandt effects. And under this stained grey canopy, like a murky, rain-clouded heaven, the lights danced and flickered on the sandy arena, and lovely females ambled round on barebacked handsomely-capari- soned steeds, and cavaliers in dusky raiment fought for the lady rider of their choice, and finally carried her off, slung across their saddle-bow, while shots were fired and noise enough was made to drag down the weather that lurked in the swelling thunder- clouds of the roof. Then the scene changed, and the fire-eater came on and ate fire and hot coals, and tied up a lad in a basket and ran a sword through it in the approved fashion. But the real joy of the evening was the lions. After a long interval the arena was cleared, and a dozen or so large sections of iron grating, very like our old nursery fender and curved in much the same way, were brought in. These were the com- ponent parts of the large circular cage in whose safe- keeping the "deadly fere" were to pursue their evolutions, and which was to be conscientiously built up before our very eyes. Slowly, methodi- cally, the work was proceeded with. These tall slats were set up and bolted together one by one, four bolts to each section, and see you don't forget it I The public will not let you off a single bolt ! All eyes were fixed on the tremendous safeguard, and the least pretermission of a bolt would have been seized upon and corrected. In what seemed an incredibly long time each bolt was tapped into its ward by the painstaking official, and an iron enclo- CH. xn] LIONS AND LACE CURTAINS 169 sure twelve feet high rose complete before us. Then the gates opened, and the great, grave, big- headed lions trooped in lazily, to the number of twelve, and took up their positions on plaster plinths placed there for them. They looked sleepy, well- fed, and hopelessly decadent. A lion in a cage has no status; it is an anomaly. The ages looking down deride, and the beasts feel their position. These show lions must have lost caste in any feline paradise, for man has known how to make them look ridiculous. I hate to see them. I do not know why, unless it is the enormous head and the encolure of that locks make its form all out of focus, but a lion always reminds me of a musical virtuoso all head and no body. . . . Then the employer of all this wasted strength, the dictator of these masses of useless muscle and taut sinew, the tamer, appeared. He was limp, unscrupulous, anxious-looking, and he continuously lashed the whip that is his safety. One knows, somehow, that every random flip counts, that the continuance of that trivial sound in the air is im- perative, like drum-taps keeping up the martial fervour which makes men die by rote, or the music that is the derivative of the tight-rope dancer. A nervous dread lest the air should cease to be stirred by that tenuous tang, should settle into quiescence and give all the forces of death leave to rush in, permeates my whole being while the ceremony goes on ; I can hardly bear it. And the lion-tamer is not so hardened to his dreadful trade but that his eyes, fixed on the dangerous couple of brutes or so who are the ring-leaders of a possible rebellion, are 1 70 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xn altogether void of fear, while his lips, pressed tight in the effort of an habitual hold of himself, are an incitement to nervous terrors. I soon ascertained the identity of the more villainous beasts he had to reckon with ; I noticed he was careful of the third lion from where I was sitting, and of the next but one to him. On these two lions he did not play the worst tricks, but left them alone as much as possible. He seemed to have confidence in a rather solid clumsy one, and poked him up frequently, and even used him for that fearful example of the art of taming that is, he put his head in between his open jaws for an appreciable second. Perhaps that lion's teeth were drawn or filed away ; I hope so. Which of us was the more relieved when the show was over, and, after a gruesome twenty minutes, the poor fellow made his bow, accepted the plaudits that were the award of his skill, and faded away out of the arena he or I ? I pictured him over his glass at the Anker, perhaps saying to himself: "Another day in safety ! Another peril overpast !" But I daresay he said nothing of the sort. I daresay he went home sober, and kissed his children and thought no more about it. A small, sprightly lady came on next and manoeuvred about with tigers, but I felt somehow that her beasts had been drugged out of all natural impulses of violence. She was obviously nervous ; she was excitable, flighty ; she minced and strutted in the jaws of death as if she didn't believe in it at all. But she, too, went bravely through her allotted span of eventful minutes in that glare, and then out CH. xn] LIONS AND LACE CURTAINS 171 of it to a lover's arms, perhaps ? One invents these stories. And now I must take the bitter taste out of my mouth with a pretty story. It is connected with that fine character, Henry the Lion. It is connected with England, too. Those ill-nurtured Plantagenets, Geoffrey and Richard of England, distrusted their father's intimacy with his German relative, Prince Henry, considering that the latter fomented their own disputes with their parent. They resolved to do their best to break the intimacy. They chose an occasion when the said gallant Prince was on a visit to them in England. They care- fully spread a report that Henry the Lion was no Prince of the blood, but just a needy adventurer. To put the matter beyond a doubt their foolish father signified his willingness that their guest should be put to a very crucial test one which the Princes declared would satisfy them. " The Lion," said they, " is the king of the forest, and knows a royal Prince by instinct, accordingly. Let one of our royal lions, therefore, be confronted by this proud Saxon, and it will then be plainly shown that he has no right to the rank which he has assumed." The old Henry agreed, and directed that one of the most ferocious of the palace meinie should be let loose on his guest as he walked, unsuspecting, in the courtyard after meat. Henry the Lion, put to the trial, was true to his name. He showed no fear, but approached the savage beast, and called to it in a tone of royal authority, as he was used. To the surprise and disappointment of the conspirators, and possibly the i/2 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xn delight of their father, the lion crouched back at his feet, and allowed the Saxon Prince to lead it quietly back to its den. From that moment, naturally, all doubts as to his princely descent were stilled and his influence with Henry of England was confirmed. And later on, when his tempestuous virtues had made him an exile from his own patrimony, he took asylum in England, and the royal palace at Win- chester was assigned to him, his Duchess and her children, as a residence. CHAPTER XIII GRAND DUKES AND GIPSIES ON entering a little German town the capital, may- be, of some small German principality, a dukedom, or an electorate of the past I always find myself thinking of some lines of Browning's : " Ours is a great wild country : If you climb to our castle's top, I don't see where your eye can stop ; For when you've passed the cornfield country, Where vineyards leave off, flocks are packed, And sheep range leads to cattle tract ; And cattle tract to open chase, And open chase to the very base Of the mountain, where at a funeral pace, Round about, solemn and slow, One by one, row after row, Up and up the pine trees go, So like black priests up and so Down on the other side again, To another, greater, wilder country That's one vast red, drear, burnt-out plain, Branched through and through with many a vein Whence iron's dug and copper's dealt. Look right, look left, look straight before, Beneath they mine, above they smelt Copper ore, and iron ore, And forge and furnace, mould and melt. 173 i/4 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xm And so on, more and ever more, Till at the last, for a bounding belt, Comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea shore, . . . And the whole is our Duke's country 1" My people used to read that aloud to me as a child, and I, except for the first and last lines of the bit I have quoted, understood nothing. They began slowly, worked up the agony gradually, and ended with a sort of triumphant lilt, as if it were a cock- robin story with a dramatic culmination, accompanied by a final gesture, a hoist of the knee, a clapping of the palms together, or any poignant touch that may aid the child-mind in a Kindergartenish way to ap- preciate. The recitation took place in the studio ; I could rest my eyes on a water-colour drawing of my father's, which, had I been old enough to dis- tinguish the features of it from the colours, would have shown me just such a country as Browning described. There, in the foreground, stands Schloss Eltz, the famous spot in the valley of the Mosel, a feudal fortress with moat, barbican, portcullis, and all the rest of it. The vineyards that the poet speaks of wind up to the summit and clothe the rampart with their verdure, but the brownish stone defences of the castle are plainly visible. Over the brow of the moor, breaking the skyline in the picture, are the first faint signs the picture was painted in 1860 of the industrial and engineering development of Germany. On the escarpment of the stone quarry of the neighbouring hill the grey smoke faintly stains the pellucid sky and adumbrates the fires of Essen. For there, in 1860, was already established the little colliery, the forerunner of the CH. xin] GRAND DUKES AND GIPSIES 175 " drear, red, burnt-up plain," that industry has made out of a garden. " Beneath they mine, above they smelt " And our Duke is there to-day, just as much a King or Prince as ever, except that the Kaiser has opened his fist and taken away the sinews of war and "sneaked" the executive from him. At S the Herzog's retainers* are by way of being handy- men about the place ; they garden and empty buckets and wait at table, dividing the work between them, or sometimes going over in a body to one particular employment, as the exigencies of much state and few pence to keep it up with may dictate. And in the embrasures of the castle rampart, on the * I regret to observe that our author here drops into the insular nonsense that distinguishes the English attitude towards German Princes. A German reigning Prince, King, or Grand Duke, has an establishment, regulated by protocol, which he is just as much bound to keep up as any other Sovereign, and which is provided for in the usual way by a civil list. The mediatized Princes, on the other hand, are private gentlemen, many of them extremely wealthy, some poor, but all of them living as they please. They are distinguished from ordinary mortals by the fact that they are Thron-fahig that is to say, capable of marrying reigning Sovereigns without the union being morganatic. Such a family is that of Teck. Many of these mediatized Princes have the right to support a small number of armed men in uniform for the protection of their residences from burglars. And I suppose it was the sight of such a Seneschal (a pensioned-off butler armed with a muzzle-loading gun at the gate of the castle of S ) that moved our author to her singular views as to the employment of the servants of German noblemen. The old gentleman with the muzzle-loading gun would never do anything more active for the remainder of his life than take a tip, for all the world like a similar functionary at the Duke of North- umberland's castle of Am wick, for showing visitors the exceedingly horrible picture gallery. J. L. F. M. H. 176 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xm tiny Platz that maintains a grey-beard in a sentry- box, or a master of the horse in regimentals, stand the poor little cannon that the Lord of P may not fire off, except to frighten the crows from his vines. At Braubach on the Rhine, in some respects the most perfect reminder of those days, after you have mastered a hill that tries the tendons of your knees to desperation, you top up the fatigues of the ascent by crossing the drawbridge and toiling up the steep flight of steps which, for the sake of modern convenience, have replaced the almost perpendicular way into the courtyard. The Lord of Braubach and his knights, returning aweary and foredone from the raid or the foray, used to have to ascend this passage, riding still on their horses, before they could enter into their impregnability. There is the castle well, the only source of water in a siege, and the great bakehouse, where the stores of flour, probably laid in before the casus belli arose, were made into bread for the garrison. Bread and water ! German Ritters, fighters in a small way, had often to be content with such fare for many a long month. And in " the chamber next an ante- room " is the Ritter Saal we see now, lived in as a rule, full of what Browning used to tell me he cordially admired " grandiose " furniture. The suits of family armour of all periods, and not all fake, stand idly round it is the room in which the Dukes have died, " breathing the breath of page or groom " since all time, like the father of Browning's corrupt hero "... in a velvet suit, With a gilt glove on his hand, and his foot In a silken shoe for a leather boot, Petticoated like a herald. . . ." CH. xni] GRAND DUKES AND GIPSIES 177 He probably had gout, which is not at all a modern disease. And his descendant, the faineant hero of the poem, though " corrupted with foreign travel," Paris and so on, harks back and yearns towards the customs of his ancestors. So he starts in to "revive all usages though worn out," and hunts up old books to find out the way among other customs of a hunting party as practised in the Middle Ages. He "... gathers up Woodcraft's authentic traditions. To encourage your dog, now, the properest chirrup, Or best prayer to St. Hubert on mounting your stirrup." The Duke's tailor "has a hot time on't," and finally the haughty little Duchess, " no bigger than a white crane," has her proper function discovered for her. " When horns wind a mort, and the deer is at siege, Let the dame of the Castle prick forth on her jennet, And with water to wash the hands of her liege In a clean ewer with a fair towelling, Let her preside at the disembowelling." The Duchess refuses, and the Duke turns the recalcitrant wife over to his august and terrible mother. Riding out of the courtyard, on his way to conduct the ceremony alone, he meets the usual band of gipsies, who wish him luck. With low cunning he sends the Gipsy Queen into the house to teach his bride her duty. The result is contrary to his expectation. It gives Browning a fine opportunity for a tirade, the opportunity of using some queer recondite knowledge he seems to have possessed about this mysterious race, and to disclose a genuine sympathy 12 i;8 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xm and understanding of their genius. He uses it again in the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. " Now," says the old German body-servant, who is supposed to be Browning's informant of these doings "... in your land Gipsies reach you, only After reaching all lands beside. North they go, South they go, trooping or lonely, And still as they travel far and wide, Catch they and keep they a trace here, a trace there, That puts you in mind of a place here, a place there. But with us, I believe, they rise out of the ground." With us that is, in Germany. And, according to Browning, just in the same sudden way did the wonderful piper irrupt into the Rathhaus at Hamelin, where the fat, self-sufficient burgomasters sat and sat, and deliberated over their deadly need. At the door comes the " gentle tap," and in he wanders, the legendary figure, the model of all wandering sages and nomadic geniuses Gringoire, Peer Gynt, Shelley, the Scholar Gipsy. . . . " His queer long coat from heel to head Was half of yellow, half of red, And he himself was tall and thin, With sharp blue eyes each like a pin, And light loose hair, yet swarthy skin, No tuft on cheek nor beard on chin, But lips where smiles went out and in, There was no guessing his kith and kin. . . ." The Pied Piper was only another Gipsy, as the gipsy crone who bewitched the Duchess irrespon- sible, kind, capricious, and revengeful, and endowed with those mysterious powers of the single-minded and single-hearted of all nations powers which the CH. xin] GRAND DUKES AND GIPSIES 179 enforced Franciscan virtues of the beggar, the rover, the proscribed, serve to develop. In the old days, I imagine, romance stalked the lonely roads and dangerous highways, incorporated in figures like these derelicts of man's injustice, or intellects before their time, wandering into smug German Dorfs and English villages by way of Tartary and Asia; men of roving, unconquerable dispositions, fortified and embittered perhaps by some deep sense of injustice, and carrying in their breasts a secret bond made with themselves to work out a revenge on the society that has misused them. The gipsy crone slavishly promises to give the lady a thorough good frightening, but once her sympathies are engaged she betrays the injurious taskmaster, and goes off on her own tack. In the lady's presence " her ignoble mien was wholly altered"; she "shot up a full head in stature ... as if Age had forgone its usurpature." She declaims : " And so at last we find my tribe, And so I set thee in the midst. ***** I trace them the vein and the other vein That meet on thy brow and part again, Making our rapid mystic mark. And then, as mid the dark, a gleam Of yet another morning breaks, And like the hand which ends the dream, Death, like the might of his sunbeam, Touches the flesh and the soul awakes. Then . . ." Ay, then ! The gipsy has bewitched the Duchess, and away they go together. And that other gipsy, the Pied Piper, defrauded of his just wages for the i8o THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xm extermination of the plague of rats by the par- simonious Town Council, what is his wild, cruel, and irresponsible revenge the revenge of a wild, untutored, unchastened being, half animal, half human ? " Once more he stept into the street, And to his lips again, Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane ; And ere he blew three notes (such sweet Soft notes as yet musician's cunning Never gave the enraptured air). . . ." And, followed by all their sons and daughters, he turned not, as in the case of the rats, to where " the Weser rolled its waters," but to the Koppel- berg Hill, which opened and swallowed all the youth of Hamelin, but one. I suppose he relented, being after all an artist, and half-human, as these persons who leaven our dull, sensible mediocrity generally are. Let the world thank God for them, for these moral lynch-lawyers, who take upon them- selves to execute poetic justice, and teach us, in the crabbed words of the artist who invented the hero of the Hamelin legend, to "... be wipers Of scores out with all men especially pipers !" the word " pipers " standing for precisely the kind of irresponsible being whom, if he is a musician, we invite into our houses to make music for us, and decline to pay, or the man who writes the books we read with avidity, while allowing the author who " cannot choose but write " to starve in a garret. Browning had German blood in him on his CH. xin] GRAND DUKES AND GIPSIES 181 mother's side, and spent a good deal of his youth in Germany. Of course, he visited Hamelin in the 'thirties. Was the legend of the Pied Piper already a full-blown commercial asset, or did he give it its value on that side ? When he walked along, as we did, from the railway-station to " Hamelin town by famous Hanover city," did he look into shop windows all the way he went, full of every con- ceivable form of exploitation of the legend ? Rat penwipers, gingerbread rats with beady currant eyes, picture postcards representing the scene, with a Pied Piper singularly like Mr. F. R. Benson, followed either by his rabble of rats or troop of beautiful eager children. And did he come to the very Rathhaus where the ignoble civic body of Hamelin deliberated, and on to where the Weser rolls, spanned now by a modern bridge, studded with craft and with great coaling barges moored under its banks ? Surely somewhere in the distance is the Koppelberg Hill, in whose sides the mys- terious portal opened to rake in its living tribute ? Alas, alas, for Hamelin ! CHAPTER XIV GREAT DANES, GEESE, MICE, AND SCHOOLMASTERS GERMANY is the land of Great Danes. I wanted a dog. I had lost two a bull-dog and a bull-terrier and I settled that the third should be a Great Dane. Every student in Marburg, so Joseph Leopold says, likes to swagger into a restaurant, swinging his great stick and followed by his Great Dane, who lies down at his feet and takes notice of nobody else. It is just swagger, not cynophilism, for as soon as the bald-headed one does what in England would be called " going down," he trades off the companion of his rambles and orgies to another student who has just " come up." But there is a certain regular demand for Great Danes in Marburg and Jena and Bonn, so Great Danes are being raised to meet this demand all over the circumambient country. We picked out a village from which to select a dog, looking over the rampart of the castle of Marburg. We chose a little spot of red with in- determinate edges, that dotted the soft green plain lying spread out flat at our feet. It happened to be the village of Cappel, and Joseph Leopold con- fidently informed me that we should find a dog 182 CH. xiv] GREAT DANES AND MICE 183 there for sale at something like four pounds, or perhaps even three. Although you have cleverly singled out a place from the bird's-eye view of it, it is not so easy to go straight there when once you have descended to the same level though it is a fact that in Germany you never have any excuse for not knowing your duty or your place. If France is Le pays du Tendre, Germany is the country of the Precise Direction. Every sign-post bears the names, writ large and clear, of numberless villages, and we struck the road to Cappel at once. We were walking along in the broad valley of the Lahn. The hills, clothed in green, rose languidly around us at a little distance. It was all arranged, like some form of expensive landscape gardening, on a large, calm scale. The absence of hedges gives this quiet, pre- meditated effect. You get stretches of soft rich meadowland and the feet of the hills drowned in sedges, rising from beds of yellow colza or red sainfoin and purple clover. In front of us was the Frauenberg, that hill of mystic rites. It is crowned by an old prehistoric earthwork and the ruins of a more modern castle. Behind us was the Wilhelms- h6he, facing Marburg with the modern imitation Gothic tower on it that positively overlooks the towers of the Elizabethen Kirche. And one saw to right and left and in front the roads parting the forest masses, laid wide and ready for the Kaiser- liche Post carts that scour His Imperial Highness's dominions, spreading the light of intelligence through the woodland silences, without abating 1 84 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xiv one jot of these people's highly-educated simplicity. The vessel of the spirit is generally, as to pattern, an old very old berime, very like the one in which the unfortunate Bourbon family went to Varennes. Its small windows are always kept tightly closed. The little varnished Kutscher, like a woodland sprite, sits on the box and drives for hours from one village, or from one forester's hut, to another. He suggests varnish, because of his dome-shaped casquette that shines like black carriage cloth, and has the immutable fixed aigrette in the front of it as an assertion of Kaiserlicher authority. There is seldom room for anyone beside him. But if you are prepared to rough it and sit inside, in the berline's stuffiness, that is the way to get about the country. The Kaiserliche Post pene- trates everywhere, where no trains and hardly any foot-passengers ever go, right into the swart heart of the Teutobergerwald and that mysterious Eiffel range that hangs over the left bank of the Rhine, and is full of wonderments, witches, and warlocks. Quite the most innocent persons you are likely to see in these Walder are charcoal-burners the very poor charcoal-burners that form the greater number of the characters of Grimm's stories, with their wonderful seventh sons and their little rush- lights burning in cottage-windows as a refuge for strayed travellers. Sometimes the only posting- house is a Forsterei, and there you can generally put up for the night if you like and sample the roughest and the wholesomest of fares. The Forster is sometimes nay, generally a great swell, and you cap him and "Tag" him politely CH. xiv] GREAT DANES AND MICE 185 when you meet him with his dog and his gun, walking briskly through lonely glades and clear- ings. He wears what always looks like a com- pletely new suit of light grey, with blue or green facings, and a soft grey felt hat with a cock's feather stuck in the band. It is his plain brown wife, I suppose, who enter- tains you for a few pfennigs under her wooden veranda, gives you beer or coffee, and even a plate of soup on one of the tiny little tables covered with the red-checked cloth dear to Germany. Her hus- band is good company if you like, and his stories have the peculiar wildness and invraisemblance of stories told by one who does not very often have an opportunity of exchanging ideas and ventilating his experiences over a glass with his brother-man. But although the dense woods lined our horizon, we were walking along on the flat, dusty road with the tamest of apple-trees bordering it. As we stepped out, a Dorf grew appreciably nearer. Presently we began to meet the troops of geese and the attendant goose-girl that furnishes the feminine element in Grimm, paddling along the muddy road. And as we got still nearer to the village we saw that the geese were at home. They were not walking, but standing about in front of their cottage-doors, so to speak, crouching down beside open gateways, and if they did not actually cackle, looking ready to stick their necks across the road and bar our passage. I have ceased to be afraid of geese and to feel instinctively the calves of my legs tingling as I approach the treacherous, white-breasted things with the cruel yellow beak 1 86 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xiv nestling in the innocent seeming down. But I have left off being civil to them and addressing a kind word to them as I pass. They never respond. A well-nurtured dog or a cat, or even a donkey, at times will do so, but there breathes a something wild and untamed in the breast of a goose before it is fattened, at any rate. It is rebarbatif, farouche, gauche. (I like to use French words about a German goose.) It has possibly its civic duties to attend to. It is either the sentinel goose to which you happen to address your remarks, and of course he is busy, or it is the lovely young goose that all the others are chaperoning. A goose's politeness is passive. If you are very unobtrusive, the whole lot will remain sitting as you pass, instead of rising with a quack and the effect of a universal curtsy. Such passivity and, as it were, ignoring of you as part of the landscape is the greatest sign of confi- dence that a goose can give. Children equally farouche, but less fierce-looking, begin to potter about under your feet as you get nearer the heart of the village. In Germany the children, with their slates and satchels, seem to me to be always coming in droves out of school, just like English ones. They all look very pretty. Most of them wear costumes. A child's costume is just like that of its elders, but in miniature. The baby of five has as many rows of trimming on her skirt as her mother, only justly proportioned to her tininess. They suggest a general affluence, these gorgeous and variegated garments of the population, which is contradicted by the tumble-down, decrepit appearance of the abodes from which they pour. CH. xiv] GREAT DANES AND MICE 187 So much straw litter is heaped, pulled out, and lying about ; opulent slushy middens rank as a foreground object ; nondescript washing is stretched over fences or the threshold bush or vine. And yet the row of grey-green jugs, transfixed, bottom upwards, on the spikes of the paling, and the house- hold vessels placed on the steps, each rinsed out efficaciously, shining with cleanness, bear witness to the Hausfrau's real notability. And in the worst little house of all, with a wide midden of mud and garbage fronting it, as ill for feet polite to cross as the Red Sea of the Israelites, chained to a rudimentary kennel between a tumble- down barn and this vast, this prehistoric-looking fumter, was a brindled darling a perfect darling ! If someone had offered to roll the Red Sea of dung away for me to cross, I should not have had the patience to wait or the prudence to go round it. I don't know how it happened, but in a few seconds I was there, and my arm on the puissant neck of the Great Dane of my dreams. Though he was chained he was gentle, sad, and very thin. I began at once to think of the kennels at Charlton and the pier at Dover, where, in prepara- tion for an enforced quarantine of six months, I should be obliged to land him in a wooden box or crate which would quite conceal him from view, and hand him over, crate and all, to a chartered official from the Government kennels. He would cost me first and last, including the initial three, quite thirteen pounds. I should not have the training of him, and he would probably never learn to love me. But no matter : I was determined to have him. i88 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xiv However, Joseph Leopold, who had seen many Great Danes and intended to be diplomatic about the purchase of this one for he saw my determina- tion written large on my face suggested that we should eat first before entering into negotiations with the landlord of the inn. This was an inn ! I had never before seen an inn like this. Joseph Leopold remarked that there were inns in the Spessart that he could tell me of where fowls slept in the room with you inns that were, moreover, in the nature of a poorhouse, so that if you had fared far and had at last succeeded in chartering a night's lodging, you might be turned out at the Government behest, if a deserving beggar should turn up and demand his right and his due a night's lodging at the hands of his country. "This is quite the roughest inn you, personally, have struck," he admitted. " Still, you won't mind what you eat here, if you end by getting the dog for three pounds ; that is, if he is for sale." For we did not even know that yet, though it seemed probable. I agreed. We did not go inside, for the Stube seemed to be reeking of smoke, though fairly clean. There was a sort of lean-to built against the wall of the house, and a thin, haggard menagere came forward and seemed to ask what she could do for us. " Was kann mann zu essen bekommen ?" Joseph Leopold used his usual negligent formula. She mentioned some comestible whose name left Joseph Leopold cold, but apparently it was all there was, and presently she served it. It was " Brodchen mit Butter, Bier, und Handkase." The bread was CH. xiv] GREAT DANES AND MICE 189 delicious, the butter good, but the cheese, made by hand ! . . . Imagine a piece of yellow soap that you have left by accident in the water in the bath-room ! Imagine yourself taking it out in despair from the bottom of the basin where it has stuck, and nipping it franti- cally in the process. Then you will realize what Handkase is. It has, indeed, been well squeezed, as its name denotes, in the palm of a large, per- suasive hand, well used to the duty. The inside remains hard, only the outside softens a little, and a few hours after, a slight, disgusting sort of skin forms on the soft surface. You cut into it and find all these layers of hardness and softness, with a few dejected carraway seeds drifting about here and there. You eat it, and it is of varying degrees of sourness and consistency; unlike the curate's egg, none of it bad, but not one square inch tasting like the other. " Very nice !" I encouraged Joseph Leopold ; " and now let us go out and look at the dog." The landlord, a hard-featured, dull-voiced, op- pressed-looking peasant came out, and spoke kindly to the beautiful, depressed animal. At his master's behest it relaxed its sad, patient austerity, and licked my hand. It licked it to order, the hand of a poten- tial owner, passionlessly, automatically. . . . What struck me so strongly about master and dog was their respectable inanity, the vacant good temper of both. Then the chain was undone, and the dog was allowed to run about to testify to his powers of locomotion. Round and round the midden he went, in a sort of dignified " lope," gathering his haunches THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xiv suavely and surely beneath him to produce that beautiful, easy, resilient stride proper to the Dane. " See, he can run !" the master said ; " he is quite young. He would go better, only I cannot afford to feed him on meat." He spoke spiritlessly, the dog ran spiritlessly. That was it. Without being actually starved, they neither of them had enough to eat.* The man * This and the whole subsequent passage about the German agricultural population represent, without doubt, an impression- istic frame of mind on the part of an author, but the conversation with myself is the purest nonsense, as well as being the sheerest invention. The innkeeper, here represented as being spiritless, was a wealthy peasant worth at least five hundred a year in English money, his inn being patronized by students from the neighbouring city, whose taste for walking would not carry them any farther than what I would call a middle distance. This gentleman could not afford to give the dog meat to eat, because with him dog breeding was a serious business, his determination being to make a profit of at least four hundred per cent, on any outlay upon the animal in question. The peasants of this part of the world are generally suspicious, obstinate, and litigious, but they are, before all things, wealthy. They own their own lands, they quarrel violently about their boundary stones, they rise in open rebellion if the State attempts changes on their territory, even though that redistribution may be for their benefit, the State giving them small fertile fields near their house in exchange for a stony acre six miles away in the mountains. Their suspicious nature is typified by the fact that if you ask one of these peasants the way to the next village, he will reply, " I am not denying that you take the second turning on the right." It is still further exemplified by the crowds of Jews that are to be found all through Hessia. The Hessian peasant detests a Jew, but he much more distrusts his neighbour. So that if peasant Schmidt desires to sell a cow to peasant Braun, he will sell it first to Cow Agent Isaacstein, and Isaacstein will afterwards sell it to the other peasant. There are, of course, tenant farmers in Germany who are poor, but I should say that upon the whole the German peasant is much better off CH. xiv] GREAT DANES AND MICE 191 hoped to have a little more to eat when he had sold the dog, as he was sure he would do, for sixty marks. The dog, if he thought at all, probably expected, in his doggy way, to be better fed when he was bought by some happy-go-lucky lavish student or other. We did not buy the dog. I cannot now think why. I dream of that dog at Cappel, sometimes. It has become a ghostly dog to me. Not that I think it was starved to death. I am sure it was bought and lived its doggy span, but it got mixed up with my sick thoughts in an illness I contracted in the course of the next few weeks. And as I lay in than the English farmer ; and the State more particularly the Prussian State does all that it possibly can to foster agrarian prosperity. The prices of agricultural produce are exceedingly high all over Germany ; no internal taxes of any kind are put upon Nahrungsmittel food products produced within the German Empire, and protection for these articles is very high and rigidly enforced. The German farmer in certain cases does not live as well as the English one ; when this is the case, it is because he is more provident on week-days, preferring to be ostentatious at feasts. He practically never has a parlour : Nottingham lace curtains are unknown to him, and wax flowers under glass shades. He may not have a piano ; but if he has one, he plays upon it himself, and it is not purchased on the hire system. He is, in fact, a peasant frequently a very rich peasant, sometimes a quite poor one ; but never in his habits, his dress, or his ambitions, a snobbish imitation of the gentry. I am, of course, talking of the peasant proprietor, and not of his employes. The shepherd, the swineherd, and the Tagelohner the day labourers generally are very poorly paid ; the furnishings of their huts would cause an English waggoner's mate to experience a sensation of sickness. And as for their diet, it consists almost entirely of potatoes and maize, with an occasional flavouring of bacon ; but, in the nature of the case, there are far fewer employed agricultural labourers in Germany than there are in England. J. L. F. M. H. 192 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xiv my bed at Marburg I thought of the day when I should be well and able to go down and across the plain again and buy that dog, and feed it up till it could run better and still better. I would not allow Joseph Leopold to go and buy it for me, I meant to buy it myself as soon as I got well. It was my dog ; I dreamt of it every night. And when I was well enough to travel, I was hustled away and nobody remembered the brindled dog I had talked about in my ravings and desired to take to England and get my mother to feed until it could run. As we walked home to Marburg that evening, Joseph Leopold, in answer to my question, " Do you suppose he feeds him ?" replied : " He feeds him as well as he feeds himself. These German peasants are mildly poor, not abjectly so. They are kept by their paternal Government at a dead level of mediocre efficiency of health. It is only in England that the farmers are really what you call prosperous. . . ." "All farmers come to grief in England," I said, " sooner or later." "Now and then ; but they cannot say they haven't had a good run for their money. These unfortunate Germans are dully, glumly conscious that they are all in the hollow of the large, paternal, indiscrimina- ting hand. He shall not suffer one sparrow to fall, etc., but if the sparrow has no joie de vivre, no fun, what does it matter if he keeps up or not ? English farming is one big gamble, with all the excitement of gambling." "Then the German peasant," I said, to show I CH. xiv] GREAT DANES AND MICE 193 understood, " knows that he can't come to grief, but he knows also that he can't come to pleasure !" " Exactly !" We went back through the paternally tended village, and I felt differently about it. There were the uncircumscribed middens and the bulging heaps of fodder flanking all the little white-painted, faintly derelict houses, having the aspect of a decay- ing tooth. And I thought of the large Iron Hand. I thought of an illustration in an old story-book of Gulliver of the helpless Lilliputians huddled into the big enclosing Brobdingnagian palm of some Kaiser or other. We picked our way along the broad highway, avoiding the deep ruts in which the water of three days' showers ran, while the white geese, with their under parts smirched, brooded in furrows, and the dressed-up children paddled in and out. We passed again the rows of housepots, grey with the soft grey of a Persian cat, perched like hats on the fences, and we emerged on to the broad unfenced road, with the fields lying close up to it, and punctuated by a scraggy apple-tree dotted at rare intervals. The towers of Marburg surged dimly up out of a haze of dampness in the distance. And I had not got my dog. We passed something very black presently a schoolmaster convoying a little flock of pupils. They seemed much occupied in poking sticks into mud-holes in the stubble fields that marched with the road. The schoolmaster industriously indi- cated these holes to them with the ferrule of his umbrella. " What are these children doing ?" I asked idly. 13 194 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xiv I was tired, and annoyed with Germany. " Is he giving them an agricultural object-lesson ?" " No, they are not learning ; they are practising agriculture. They are eradicating mice." " Killing them, do you mean ? And the school- master showing the little wretches how?" I shrieked. " The mice are ruining the crops," Joseph Leopold said mildly. " These rodents are very noxious. I remember last year at G there was a plague of mice. You could not walk in the fields without putting your foot on them. . . ." He maundered on about the damage done by these pretty little creatures yes, I have seen even a rat that was pretty, and any way it is a dumb animal. I was so annoyed with Germany, as I said before, that I walked on in resentful silence. To see a schoolmaster, instead of acting as he should have done in the interests of humanity, actually inciting his class to deeds of cruelty was too much for the traces of British feeling that yet lingered in my alien breast. And then it was Saturday evening the German church bells began to ring in Sunday, as is their custom. I hate church bells as much as the Devil is said to do, and now I hate German schoolmasters. I thought of another German custom which I had heard hinted at, and it was connected with mice, so I took it up as a stick to hit a German with. " I suppose cats do the dirty work in England," I said ; " but I never seem to see a cat in Germany. Plenty of kittens, but no cats. I suppose you eat them as soon as they are fat enough ?" "Something in that!" Joseph Leopold remarked CH. xiv] GREAT DANES AND MICE 195 cruelly. " But the real reason is that they eat the birds. Germans love birds, and would sooner have an aviary than a cattery like yours. I am a German, and / love birds." I got back to Marburg without a dog, and with several illusions the less about Germans, and about Joseph Leopold in particular. But when Joseph Leopold referred to his stay in G I remembered an anecdote which a learned friend of his, a Pro- fessor in the said town, once related to me. Joseph Leopold's sentimental vagary amused and in- terested the Professor, and I set it against his callousness with regard to mice and cats. Everyone knows that Rehfleisch is the house- keeper's best asset in Germany, and her English sister who sighs so pathetically for a " new beast " is emphatically the poorer in culinary invention, because the English butcher takes so little definite cognizance of the animal that pants in vain. But in G deer are caught and brought in alive from the neighbouring forest, placed in some improvised pen and fattened. Clients of a favourite eating-place may see and inspect their meal of a month hence increasing behind his wattled prison. Children may poke the poor thing with their sticks, prod him, throw him mock food to eat, stare and gibe at the patient misery of the wild creature, prisoned in an enclosing cage where he may not evade their persecution, but only lie down and await his doom. One day, when the right amount of adipose tissue has deposited itself on his bones, his windpipe is slit and the table of mine host of the Golden Anchor knows the rest. 1 1 is true that if one allows such 196 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xiv fine feelings to sway one, one must leave off eating Reh ; and Joseph Leopold likes Reh, and eats it when- ever he can get it. But the sight of the means to the end is repellent to him. Each prod of a passenger's umbrella at the deer of G , each stupid onslaught on the creature's temporary peace, went to his heart. It would have gone to mine ; and when, later on, he confessed to the incident, half in shame, half in pride, I admitted that he could have taken no other course. He approached the inn people, and asked if he might be permitted to purchase the deer alive. They naturally agreed at once. A price was fixed 3 ios- and Joseph Leopold took his Reh, hired a cart, and placed the bemused and recalcitrant beast in it. Behold the philanthropist driving off jubilantly to the forest, across a couple of fields or so, until he comes with his prey to a clear space where the dead leaves are not so thick, and the low boughs hold away a little. Then he releases the frightened, scared thing, and watches it bound away to the forest. One hoped it lived happily ever after to the natural term of a roe-deer's life. But would its friends be kind to it ? Would its limbs be as nimble after their long spell of restraint ? Would it not get caught again and eaten ? Did Joseph Leopold himself eat it after all ? There is no knowing. But the peace that passeth understanding must have been his as he watched the deer bound away into the open. Such a thing can never have hap- pened before in all the annals of deerdom. And as the German Herr Professor who first told me the tale said, the inn people were no losers and CH. xiv] GREAT DANES AND MICE 197 promptly supplied themselves with a fresh deer. Joseph Leopold did not know this, for natural modesty kept the hero of such a virtuous and un- worldly action at a distance from the scene of his exploit. CHAPTER XV "DRIZZLING" AND OFFICERS KASSEL adequately represents Germany of the eighteenth century. To look out on that wide Platz, with a royal residence on one side, a Caserne on the other, a glacis on the third, and a statue of a royal Duke in the middle, is to think of banner-screens, and Berlin wool-work, and tight stays, and etiquette, and Karoline Bauer and the tragedy of " drizzling." Very few people know anything about " drizzling," but they all know something about the beautiful actress, Karoline Bauer, who persuaded her uncle, stiff old General Bauer of Kassel, to let her go on the stage. And she was very like Princess Char- lotte of England, the dead spouse of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. The Prince, most morose, hand- somest man of his age, was a confirmed " drizzler." And pretty Karoline had played when a child with him. Her cousin, Christian Stockmar, managed the Prince of Coburg, and later, through the respect which the Prince Consort had for him, he exercised a very considerable influence over the Court and policy of the late Queen Victoria of England. He was a managing man, and he managed his niece's 198 CH. xv] "DRIZZLING" AND OFFICERS 199 affairs for her very badly, if we are to believe the statements made in that vivacious lady's memoirs. Trading upon the chance likeness of the young actress to the dead Charlotte of Wales, he engineered a love-affair and persuaded Karoline Bauer to come to England in the hope of becoming the stony but broken-hearted Leopold's morganatic wife. Poor Karoline and her good mother, en tout bien tout honneur, were planted out in a villa in the Regent's Park, and Prince Leopold went to tea with them and " drizzled," and the " drizzling " was the worst part of it for Karoline to bear, and her chafing under it would have lost her her place if the prospect of the Greek Throne had not done so more effectually. After a year's suspense in England, when the " drizzler's " visits were all the amusement she had, she was ignominiously packed back to Coburg as Countess Montgomery, and, her memoirs say, "worse than hang" of all the German-English royalties. " Drizzling " was invented in France by the fair bored ones of Versailles, and they called \iparfilage. They begged their male friends for gold and silver epaulettes, hilt-bands, galloons and tassels, so that a lover in those days, to make himself agreeable, would rob himself prematurely of the chief orna- ments of his wardrobe, and present them to the lady. She would put them all into a huge picking-bag, and take them to Court, where she was proudest whose bag ran over with the best gold. Bets between the sexes were settled, not in hard cash, but in so many gold tassels for picking. Madame de Genlis took credit with herself for having put a stop to this traffic in galloons and lace. " Since Adele and Theodore," 200 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xv she says, " no lady has been seen in Society demand- ing gold for picking from a man." The ladies of France went back to embroidery, " the needlework which had once agreeably whiled away the time of our mothers and grandmothers," and parfilage crossed over to England, where it was called 11 drizzling." Karoline Bauer's lover was royal, and therefore prone to the royal disorder of ennui. He combated it by " drizzling " to the intense vexation of the sprightly Karoline. To see the Prince alight from his carriage, followed by his groom bearing the " awful drizzling box, made of tortoise-shell," with- out yawning in his face ; to sit beside him while he " drizzled with monotonous regularity," made her inclined to run away without waiting for the Prince to declare himself, and thus defeat all the best-laid schemes of Cousin Christian. But she " sat tight " and lost him after all ! Then Berlin wool-work came in and drove all before it even " drizzling." It killed all artistic needlework in England till the establishment of the firm of Morris and Company. But it probably was just as efficacious by way of a thought-annihilator as any other form of occupation, and there is no doubt that it sorted with the inferior art-instinct of that generation. Taught, as a little girl, by my astute nurse to make an entire wardrobe for the doll I cherished, nude as it came from the godmother, I did not realize at that time that I was laying up balm in Gilead, a panacea for my middle age. And as the keeping of a diary is advised by way of incul- CH. xv] "DRIZZLING" AND OFFICERS 201 eating unconscious habits of composition, so my nurse's insistence on an irksome degree of pro- ficiency gained me that mechanical skill which enables me to give but the very slightest attention to the coloured worsted that blocks out a leaf, or the seam that unrolls itself steadily from the pin fixing it to the knee. If only half a mind is left, the other half is not much good to worry with. A certain adjustment of the proportions only is needed to render one process void and the other useful. Of course, the work must be a little better than the perfunctory night's sewing of an actress en scene. That is only fit, like Penelope's, to be unravelled again by day, though I am credibly informed that some of our leading ladies hem all their household linen during the run of a successful piece ! As I am never, or hardly ever, to be seen without a piece of useful needlework in my hand, what I am going to say will inevitably suggest that I possess a character of the most restless, the most pernicketty. I sew that I may not weep or, rather, worry. Other people smoke or play Patience to promote their powers of abstention from a process as undesirable as it is futile. But from all ages, I fancy, this prin- ciple has been conceded : that it is good to withdraw even so much as a fraction of one's attention from whatever represents the prevailing form of obsession ; an obsession that requires concentration to intensify it. It gets it all the boring, drilling force of intellect focussed on an annoyance unless some such panacea as has been the heritage of all the ages is resorted to. The Egyptians possessed playing-cards; they probably played Patiences in their mansions on the 202 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xv broiling sand. Greek women spun, and we know the medieval ladies embroidered " sitting, lily like, a-row." The Bayeux tapestry probably represents the nerve-outlet of Matilda, the wife of the Con- queror, and of all the wives of his ragamuffin host, left at home in Normand}' to worry over the results of the great coup and bid for landed property. What of Mary Queen of Scots' needlework, which is always turning up in exhibitions, and a large piece of which is still shown among the arid stone- work of a temporary abode of hers Edinburgh Castle ? Women who sew are generally good-tempered. And I can point to instances of great intellects among my sex who have not scorned the innocent derivative of confessedly feminine occupation. I can mention three women, authors, who were notoriously nimble with their fingers, and one of them, George Eliot, to my knowledge, gave some umbrage to a distinguished male visitor, who called and found her, as her custom was, engaged on a piece of ugly, uninteresting white work. Was she stitching shirt-bands for the late George Henry Lewis, that this other literary magnate felt and expressed such irritation to me years afterwards? Charlotte Bronte, too, was a fine needlewoman, though I do not think she embroidered she probably made lace collarettes, as my own mother did when sewing in company. George Sand was another example of the woman of genius who realizes the immense use of a mechanical non- fatiguing occupation as a thought-killer but then, she smoked as well ! CH. xv] "DRIZZLING" AND OFFICERS 203 The best instance is that of the greatest woman of all. Joan of Arc, in her trial, was once, and once only, stung into the expression of a personal and domestic point of pride. " Oh, as far as sewing and spinning goes, I give way to no woman in Rouen !" she said, and even the monkish chroniclers of the court-house have not been able to take the innocent vanity out of the phrase. From Kassel one goes to see WilhelmshOhe, and I wonder if I shall be sent to Glatz or Spandau, like Lieutenant Bilse, if I venture to put on paper what I think about Wilhelmshohe, because I think it is without exception the ugliest place I ever saw, the most elaborately tasteless, the crudest in bad- prevailing colour. My impressions of it began to be planted at the bend of the line going to Kassel ; where it slewed round and let me see in the dis- tance a pretentious mock ruin on the crest of the hill. It was not the ruin of a castle, it was the elaborate structure of the Hercules Cascade. Even from that distance I could discern the artificially chopped stones, disposed in tiers, like the worst Strawberry Hill Gothic, and of very large propor- tions ; and that is, I suppose, why the erection, as a whole, is called after Hercules. The palace, I was told, lay in the hollow below, between the cascade and the railway-station it has a station all to itself where Sovereigns, regnant and deposed, both must alight. Napoleon III, after Sedan, was forced to drag his weary disease-ridden body there. Somewhere on the road between Sedan and here is the little posting-house where he lay all night, and read in bed to try and procure sleep. Archibald 204 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xv Forbes told me what it was he was reading a novel of Bulwer's, " The Last of the Barons." And Forbes, in his capacity of war-correspondent, was there when the Emperor gave up his sword to the old, severe, but by no means brutal, Moltke. It was a sad mess ; the people who shouted A Berlin I so frantically were in the first place not ready, and in the second cruelly " done " by their army fournis- seurs. Joseph Leopold pointed out to me the hill that the Emperor stood on that day, and, sadly put- ting his field-glass back in its sheath, admitted that he had lost the field through bad guns, bad boots, and want of discipline. Sedan field is as tame as Edge Hill, where a Stuart lost his chance, or Nevill's Cross on the Red Hills near Durham that once ran with blood. Sedan field is more riante, perhaps, than either of these. I don't think I ever realized the bitterness of the Emperor's cup till I saw the scene of his fall, in this quiet plain, so far from palpitating Paris, where wife and child, his hostages, were sheltered only by the success of his Eagles. And there, among these tame sedges, the Eagles declined and the Emperor folded up his glasses and knew full well what would be the next move Wilhelmshohe and its hideous tasteless magnificence, and old Wilhelm's sardonic deference. There are carp in the lake at Wilhelmshohe, but Napoleon le Petit had never lived at Versailles, to be agreeably reminded of it at Wilhelmshohe. And there are gardens at Wilhelmshohe, a profusion of aniline-dyed flowers set out in flat mathematical beds, like table decorations, and window-boxes fit to tear your eyes out. The sick man recked little of CH. xv] "DRIZZLING" AND OFFICERS 205 that. I imagine him lying there, wondering " a quelle sauce il serait mange." We saw the very bed on which he lay, in the Empire-decorated suite of rooms allotted by the old King to his distinguished guest. That was a matter of custodians, and tips, and felt slippers. Yes, before we were allowed to set foot in the State apartments, Joseph Leopold and I and a miscellaneous collection of tourists, chiefly women" were asked to put on felt slippers, nominally to prevent us from slipping on the highly-polished parquets, but I am sure it was to avert the possible damage that our dirty, clumsy boots might entail. I say slippers, but these objects, flung at us out of a cupboard near the entry in a contemptuous manner by the custodian, were more like boats, more like arks, and I should have found it impossible to walk in them. I said so. And with a look at my clod- hoppers, which, beside those of the other two German women's, had the effect of what English shoemakers would have called " smart " shoes that is to say, delicate and refined to a point the custodian tacitly agreed that such fairy footsteps as mine could do no damage, and invited me to proceed, unshod in the felt boats. After we had seen the Napoleon suite and the suite which the Kaiser inhabits with his family when he comes down to feast his eyes on his red and yellow flowers, we got out of the palace again and went to look at the carp and to send off picture post-cards from the great post-office which the Kaiser maintains in the grounds ; and then it began to rain and we decided to mount to the cascade. 206 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xv At close quarters the Hercules Cascade resembles a huge sugar cake, or one of the e'pergnes that in Thackeray's day used to be placed in the centre of the table to prevent husbands and wives seeing each other. This ghastly erection fills up the whole of the prospect and horribly interrupts the sky-line. It is the only thing one sees from the windows of the Napoleon suite. Macabre and cheerless, it can- not have induced any more pleasant thoughts than those that the son of Hortense had any right to. We went back to Kassel and the land of Casernes and officers, and upon my word Kassel seemed almost picturesque after the palace of the German Caesars. The sky was a cold steely blue ; we heard the cliqmtis of arms as we approached the barracks. Looking over a wall from the top of the tram, we saw the privates washing their linen. It was late in the year, and those heralds of autumn, the reservists, were coming back. So they say in Germany, while summer is shown in by the appear- ance of Mai Bowie on people's tables and placarded in the signs of Gastwirthschaften. I like Mai Bowie, but I rather hate soldiers ; and, above all, Prussian officers, and there are many at Kassel. I was really afraid of German officers till I knew Herr W . He is a friend of Joseph Leopold's, and on the morning of my arrival in my house in H , I looked out of the window, and saw a fat officer on a fat white horse, bowing and prancing and paying his respects. He was an engineer as well. I don't really understand how a man can be both an officer and the head of a railway line, but in Germany, it appears, he can monopolize these two CH. xv] "DRIZZLING" AND OFFICERS 207 very onerous offices. And Herr W is heavy but polite. In Wiesbaden I had met officers in the Alice, as free to me as to them, or so I had thought, and they had literally forced me to give them the pas, under pain of being knocked down. There is nothing in the world like the aggressiveness of a Prussian officer. And I had seen them, when I have been staying in garrison towns, at hotels where they habitually dine or sup. But does anyone sup- pose that they condescend to sit down with the rest of us ? No, noisily and consciously* they swagger through the common Speisesaal into a special Saal reserved for them a holy of holies to where the best dishes are carried in first. And if by chance a poor little common soldier happens to be eating his humble meal along with us in the common dining- room, he has hastily to swallow the mouthful he has just taken into his mouth, stand up, and click his heels together, remaining in that humiliating position until his brilliant superior has passed by. I have seen a poor little pion rise at least a dozen times in the course of one meal to the unspoken hest of a brilliant being with floating cloak and with ringing spurs t who comes bumptiously clashing in. * I do not know how our author penetrated into the psychologies of these gentlemen so as to know whether they were conscious or not, but, in most hotels of the civilized world, the regular guests of those hotels, whether they be Cabinet Ministers or bagmen, are given either regular tables, or, supposing the company be sufficient to warrant it, a separate room. So it was with the officers whom our author has seen. J. L. F. M. H. t This would be precisely the same in England if a private soldier in uniform happened to be eating in a restaurant when an officer in uniform entered. English officers in uniform are not 208 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xv I do not care for the horrid little jimp-skimp ill- made grey ulsters that the Einjahrige wear, but I deeply admire the flamboyant cloak of grey, with blue Gerard collar and gold military braid, worn by officers. I admired them so much that I suggested to Joseph Leopold that he should have a cloak made like them borrow that of his friend Lieutenant von L., for whom I had once done some slight service in introducing him to a young lady he hap- pened to admire at Nauheim. " To wear when you take me out to tea on Campden Hill ?" Joseph Leopold inquired. I explained that it would not be so much for Campden Hill as for travelling about in our native country, and he replied that he would rather not be arrested. All these rude handsome men were, of course, alike to me, but by the fashion of their garments Joseph Leopold seemed to know to which corps they belonged. In Trier, a frontier town, officers are paramount; I mean they infest every walk of life. You go for a walk to some distant Bier Garten, and there you see all these gay uniforms sitting with plain women at little tables on the rough grass, looking much too smart in their gold galloon and blue cloth for their ill-dressed females. And all along the wooded heights above Trier you stop to take breath, and there comes to you the rub-a-dub allowed to travel in public conveyances, or in any class but first class on railways, because if a private soldier happened to be in the same compartment, the private soldier would have to remain on his feet during the journey. The same reasonable regulation obtains in Germany. J. L. F. M. H. CH. xv] "DRIZZLING" AND OFFICERS 209 of the conscripts practising.* It is an ordinance that they may not do so any nearer town than a mile. In frontier towns one always feels in the air the unrest, the indecisions of a population standing on debatable ground. During the war scare of 1910 eighty-four thousand men were quartered in Trier. The men were perforce billeted in all the houses. The citizens did not mind that, for daughters went off marvellously during this pacific occupation. * These gentlemen are not conscripts, and what our author means is that when a regimental band is practising a new piece of music, or new recruits are trying their hand at bugle calls, they are requested to retire to some distance from the town. This practice prevails in most civilized countries. I remember getting great pleasure outside the city of Tarascon hearing a regimental band of chasseurs practising in an abandoned graveyard an excerpt from " Die Walkure." J. L. F. M. H. CHAPTER XVI HOW IT FEELS TO BE MEMBERS OF SUBJECT RACES* DOWN below, at the bottom of the hill with the many barrows, a dog barked unceasingly. It is absurd the amount of colour they get into these German landscapes. It is almost as if Nature had gone mad. The only thing that, beneath the hot sun, was sober was the bit of hill-top with the barrows where we lay. The hill might have been a little piece of an English down, dun-coloured, irregular, and quarried again and again. But the ploughed land that came up to our feet was reddish in the high lights and purplish in the shadow. The boughs of the apple-trees, absurdly thick with nacreous blossom, pushed themselves wildly up at the blue sky between the scarlet roofs of houses that were whitewashed and then painted, between their black timbers, with bouquets of flowers, stags, or pious, joyous, complaisant, or defiant verses. One of these verses as we had come up through the village we had observed to run : " God helped me to build this house. If you mock at its appearance you will not hurt me, for with the aid of God I built it to please myself." And lying one day on just * By Ford Madox Hueffer. 210 CH. xvi] SUBJECT RACES 211 this range of hills an old Landgraf Heinrich eight hundred years ago made up this verse: "There is no place so pleasant as this valley that I look upon. For it has a river that is beloved, good hunting, pleasant woods, fine hills, and excellent feeding, as well as many apple-trees and song-birds." And triumphantly he adds : " Und dat ick mein !" (" And that I think and that is mine "). He must have been a fine old man, and all that he said of his valley which contains still the "beloved" River Lein all that he said is true. The dog continued to bark incessantly, two hundred and forty little sharp barks to the minute, and then suddenly it came into our heads to observe that the creature was standing planted just outside its hedge and barking at us. We lay quite still, the dog stood perfectly still and barked. It seemed to resemble the result of several crosses between a rat, a rabbit, and a wire-haired terrier. But it was so far down the hill that the sharp notes of its voice were no more disturbing than the rustle of wind in the false brent grass on the barrows. And, sud- denly, again it came into our heads to wonder whose territory the dog with such a querulous valiance was defending against us people who lay among the forgotten dead. We could not say, without looking at a map, whether this country was the kingdom of Hanover, the duchy of Brunswick, Westphalia, or Prussia proper. It has been all these things by turns, and it is certainly Prussia now. There is no doubt about that. And once in addition it was certainly English territory in a manner of speaking, and once 212 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvi without any figure of speech at all, it was much more certainly part of the Empire of France. Now the peace of Prussia broods all across the broad landscape. Conquered territory, that is what it all is, and the cross between a Hanover rat and an Irish terrier continued vociferously to defend it. After all, that was patriotism. Consider all the owners of this land from Henry the Lion till the days of Imperial Chancellor Beth- mann-Hollweg ! Consider their splendid feats, or the mere tough obstinacy of their patriotisms. Con- sider how they won great fights and lost all their territories. It does not matter whether it was George by the grace of God King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, who got hold of Celle by mar- riage with Dorothea of that ilk, and then got rid of Dorothea. It does not matter that George II fought with the obstinacy of that rat-dog at Dettingen. It does not matter that in 1809 the Duke Frederick William, " with only nineteen hundred men, pierced through the all-conquering French from Bohemia to the River Weser." He took Halberstadt by storm ; he beat back the French before the gates of the town which from our barrows we can see in the distance. He pierced through till he came to the North Sea and to England. He fought with his troop in the Peninsula, and fell at Quatre Bras two days before Waterloo. He and his nineteen hundred men were the Black Brunswickers, and it is a good thing to remember what they did. And lying in the hot sun on the brown grass, looking at all this conquered territory, we remember that we, too, are conquered. It is an odd, sleepy CH. xvi] SUBJECT RACES 213 thought. Far below us lies what was once, in a manner of speaking, English territory. On the barracks just by the town gate we shall see still the royal arms of England. And below us lies what was once Westphalian territory, and, in a manner of speaking, we are Westphalian. Actually we, the conquered, are subjects of the Grand Duke of Hessen-Darmstadt und bei Rhein, a most charming potentate. But we Hessians, in moments of pictur- esque depression, are accustomed to say that we are not Prussians but " Must-Prussians." We don't want to be, but we cannot help it. We have against Prussia numbers of grievances, connected with rail- ways and all sorts of little things. So that we, lying among the barrows, are most extraordinarily conquered people. We could not be more conquered if we tried. The sun is very warm ; the sky is very blue ; the dog-rabbit-rat entertains us with the queer sound of its two hundred and forty barks a minute. But are we, English-Westphalian- Hessian a queer mixture like that of the rat-rabbit- dog are we going to get up and do anything about it ? Not a bit of it. We shall not be even as energetic as the triple quadruped. We have not got so much as a bark in us. And why ? It is disgraceful to be conquered. It ought to be mortifying to lie with a threefold mailed heel upon our throats. But really we cannot feel disgraced ; we cannot feel mortified ; we can only feel it odd that we don't. For consider this tremen- dous Prussia that lies all abroad across this land, more evenly than the light of the sun itself. Look at the old, old town on the horizon ; mark how its 2i 4 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvi roofs smoulder in the sunlight and its cathedral towers burn with their burnished gold. No doubt the man who could write triumphantly eight hundred years ago, " Und dat ick mein " no doubt his ghost, if it be sitting beside us amongst the barrows, sees little enough of change in his valley of the beloved Lein. And yet from the corners of our eyes we can per- ceive the difference that there is. Just round the corner of the hill there comes a shower of apple blossoms. They seem to be arranged, in this absurd country where everything is decorative they seem to be arranged like a Japanese screen, to hide what the difference really is. Yet this screen the eye can pierce ; there they are five, seven, a dozen of them, immensely tall, thin, black, throwing up from their summits, like defiant banners, their plumes of smoke. They are the factory chimneys ; and the factory chimneys are what, along with peace, Prussia has given to these Hanoverian lands. And along with them go the broad white modern suburbs that from here the trees hide. Along with them go the easy, pleasant, electric trams, the funny- looking electric trains that connect, every ten minutes or so, each of the large historic towns of this country- side. Prussia has conquered us, but undoubtedly Prussia has given us plenty along with peace. We are probably much more poetic than any Prussian. All our poetry is said to come from south of Frankfort-on-the-Main, and we cannot imagine any Prussian lying conquered amongst barrows, and moralizing about the barking of a dog that re- sembles a rat. We are probably even more valiant CH. xvi] SUBJECT RACES 215 in a swift way than the Prussians. It was not Prussia who produced the Black Brunswickers. We could probably get up and beat any blessed nation at any blessed moment. But it would be just like Langensalza. At Langensalza in 1866 King George V and last of Hanover beat the Prussians quite handsomely ; but he woke up to find that every spot in Hanover was in the possession of Prussians every spot with the exception of the field of Langensalza. And that is just like us. On a hill that we can see from here our ancestors the common ancestors of us English, Westphalian, Hanoverians, having hopelessly defeated a Caesar in the forests a little to the south on that hill where there is an excellent tea-garden, our an- cestors buried a complete solid silver table service for four Roman noblemen. Yet the Romans were about the only people who never conquered us after we had spendidly defeated them, and we may sup- pose that that table service which our ancestors buried was about the only booty that we ever made by our heroism and kept for a reasonable space of time. We did keep it for some eighteen hundred years, and no doubt we should keep it to-day buried in a hill. But in 1868 some Prussians, coming grubbing about, putting up a waterworks or something useful and modern, found that table service. It is now naturally in Berlin. And that is perhaps the moral of the whole story for us Saxons and Anglo-Saxons. It is like the moral of the rat-dog that keeps up its barking perpetually through these sentences. For some of us are poets, and some of us in the great stretches 216 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvi of moor and heather that at the due seasons turn all this countryside wine-purple into eternal distances some of us, nay, many of us, have the second sight. Now and then we can produce heroes by the nineteen hundred, or heroes in little boatsful that go out to attack Armadas. But in between we seem to have our periods of slackness. We have them inevitably. The other day an excellent, energetic, and quite English lady said to us some- where in Kensington : " I wish to heaven the Prussians would conquer this country and ad- minister it. Then there would be an end of our disgusting slackness." This seemed to us at the moment an astonishing opinion. But lying here lazily among the barrows we realize suddenly that it is comprehensible enough. If the Prussians had England. . . . If the Prussians had England . . . you know, lying here it almost seems inevitable. Not to-day, not to-morrow, not in ten years, not in twenty, not in any time into which there will survive any of the passions or bitternesses of to-day, but in some time when the English won't care and the Prussians will. That is the real secret of it all. There always comes a time when we don't care ; there never was and there never will be a time when these formidable products of the mark of Brandenburg were not and will not be sleeplessly upon the watch. It is like the case of the prisoner that somebody once put, we don't remember where. The prisoner, given life, must always in the end escape, for the gaoler must always in the end grow tired of the game and relax his vigilance. He may wake to earnestness once CH. xvi] SUBJECT RACES 217 more, but then it will be too late, and lying there the dog is still barking we suddenly begin to think of those green, fertile, and immensely wealthy islands in the Western sea. And just for a moment we think of what is called home politics, and then, with a quick shudder, we drop the thought. For we are not politicians of any politics that to-day can show beneath the light of the sun. We are what is called high Tories . . . but immensely, immensely high. We are the people who will win terrific victories against enormous odds in the game of tennis, or in the other game of tennis that used to be played with stone balls. But in the end, some Prussian, some Jew, or some Radical politician will sleeplessly get the best of us and take away the prizes of our game. That is the way God arranges it ; Who arranged alike the barrows, the beloved little river of the Lein; Who set courage in the hearts of the nineteen hundred in black garments that went " from Bohemia to the River Weser"; Who set it in the hearts of the Prussians that it is for them to administer ; and to administer and again to administer for the love of the thing just as for the love of words we utter them. And, with the shadow of the thought of " home politics " still upon us, we say once more, "It is the will of God." Rat-dog- rabbit ; English- Westphalian-Hessian ; one of three will rule us in the end, Prussian, Jew, or hungry tradesman. And for ourselves we say as we get up and go down the hill : " Please God that it will be the Prussian." He at least will administer, will enrich us, and will leave us somewhere some barrows in the sun amongst which to lie. Possibly 218 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvi he will even put up an Aussichtsthurm and a tea- garden. At any rate, he alone of those three sleep- less ones will not strip us naked to the breezes. We go down the hill by a sunken road. On the hot turf just above our faces the absurd dog stands with its legs firmly planted and barks at us. Pushing through the hawthorn hedge of the first house in the village there comes another dog. But it is a puppy ; it is smaller than a rat ; it resembles a brown cloth child's toy. It is the child of the rat-dog-rabbit, and it is more absurd than any creature reported by Sir Richard Mandeville or by Gulliver. It plants its four legs in the warm turf, and it barks, and it barks. We stand and look at it, and it continues to bark. It does not move ; nothing will move it. It is ad- ministering. That breed will not die out, you see. There are some people who desire accuracies though one write never so "impressionalistically." The city to which we have referred is not Hanover ; is not Brunswick ; is not Osnabriick ; is not Celle ; is not any actual city, but contains what we like to remember as an impression of all these. Similarly it is not even Hamelin of the rats. Similarly we really know that this stretch of country was never pedagogically English territory. It was country united under the sovereignty of the wearer of the English crown by what was called the personal union. But that would have been good enough for Prussia. In the year 1837 this country passed from under the sway of the ruler of Great Britain, owing to a trifle called the Salic law. Speaking in accurate English, the Salic law was not CH. xvi] SUBJECT RACES 219 a trifle. But it has not bothered the Prussian gullet much. Some time ago I was standing in the yard of a brewery in Ashford, which is in Kent An immense drayman was about to drink down a pot of ale. He was called into the office and he set his pot on the tail of his cart. Some evil practical jokers who were standing by dropped a dead mouse into the pot. Out comes the drayman, lifts the pot to his mouth, drinks down at one draught the ale and the mouse, and then, having wiped his mouth upon his sleeve, he remarked, "A hop or a cork!" to the wonder and admiration of all beholders. CHAPTER XVII QUEENS DISCROWNED A TRAM in the open country always seems to me wrong ; there is something so brutal, so casual and reckless about the way it tears across fields, bisects roads, shaves cottages, and disregards, if it does not actually remove, landmarks. And all the way from Hildesheim, Joseph Leopold and I were think- ing, from totally different standpoints, of the great and important town we were about to visit. He was, I knew, dreaming of the splendid, progressive modern collection of parks and warehouses, theatres, picture-palaces, and shops, with the " old part " con- temptuously tucked away in a circle of cramping villadom like a bullet encysted that the doctors do not care to remove in the midst of the new cells of Hanover's reconstituted modernity. But I was thinking, like the lover of Cynara, "of an old passion," of grim and lonely palaces given over to sightseers, of Herrenhausen and the Leine Schloss, and piteous Discrowned Queens. There were Sophia Dorothea, and Caroline Matilda, the one of England at least, she ought to have been and the other of Denmark. She only 220 CH.XVII] QUEENS DISCROWNED 221 reigned a year. Sophia Dorothea accomplished in the old Leine Schloss her dreary tragedy of royal neglect and the fatal consolations of a courtier. Caroline Matilda, the beautiful mismated sister of George III, came here weeping, a wreck, to Herrenhausen to drag out the remainder of her discredited exis- tence in the red-brick dower - house that was the appanage of her relatives. This lady trailed her misery through Celle, too. But Celle was connected only with the innocent, feted youth of Sophia Dorothea, whose lover lies steeped in quicklime under the flags of the Ritter Saal in the old palace of the Electors of Hanover. And as we breathlessly traversed the flat Prussian plains, Joseph Leopold talked of what interested him more than mere romantic personalities about royal ladies ; of the spirit of Germany, of the march of armies over those very fields, of how the smug little Dorfs that we saw dotting the plain were occupied, sacked, rifled and pillaged, again and again, by Wallenstein and Tilly, and their soldiers of fortune. Yet my thoughts obstinately remained with the daughter of the Duke of Zell and Eleonore d'Olbreuse, who should have been Queen of England, but died mere Duchess of Ahlden, and Ahlden is a little homestead not much bigger or more important than the seat of the humbler sort of country gentle- man in the England of the eighteenth century. The love of an uncrowned Queen is a sentiment implanted in the hearts of men. It is an old, old mental attitude a Schwarmerei, as the Germans would call it that affects both sexes alike. It began or who shall say it began ? with Helen of 222 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvn Troy. It ended and who shall say it has ended ? with the ex-Empress Eugenie. Nowadays, the record of certain social movements iri the daily papers enables us to reconstitute the picture of a graceful mourning figure, descending at the Gare du Nord, and driving to the Rue de Rivoli (named so by the great one of her family), and taking up her abode in the hotel that overlooks the gardens of her lost palace. On reading this item of fashionable news do not we, most of us, have a sympathetic tremor ? We say, " How stoical !" or else, " How callous I" and we incline to the former theory. Physiologists will be likely to suggest as an explanation of the attitude of the wonderful old lady of eighty, some sort of atrophy of the emotional centres, and that is the explanation for me. I hope it happens in the majority of cases of slow, living deaths by imprisonment, and dispossession. I cannot imagine, for instance, the high-spirited, selfish school- girl, that modern historians tell us Mary Stuart was, settling down at Lochleven and Bolton and Fotheringay, supinely allowing her would-be rescuers to go to the scaffold one after another, and believe her to have remained the mercurial, highly sensitized being who landed at the port of Leith one summer's day with Chatelard in her train and all the airs of France about her. Yet it would indeed seem that, barring the constant hope of rescue, a slight titilla- tion of interest as regular and as journalier as to us the morning paper on the breakfast table, Mary Stuart did settle down to her prayers, and her rheumatism, and the ordering of her household, and the teasing of her custodians. And did not CH. xvii] QUEENS DISCROWNED 223 Caroline of Brunswick, whose coffin, under its red velvet pall, lies in the crypt in the family cathedral at Hanover did not Caroline, witty, bitter and unwashed, did not she take refuge in cynicism, the employment of a ready tongue upon the castiga- tion of the many weak spots that characterized her vulnerable consort? Once, in her hearty prime, she had adopted the tactics of a Suffra- gette, and had demonstrated her wrong on the very spot where that wrong was focussed the Abbey steps, where her unregenerate husband was managing to get himself crowned without her. And Sophia Dorothea, the wife of George I, she that should have been crowned Queen of England in the fulness of time, soothed herself, during her thirty years of durance among the marshes of Ahlden, with elaborately mounting her not incon- siderable household, paying her bills regularly, seeing her stewards, and furiously driving within the bounds assigned her by her ex -husband. Exceeding the speed-limit was evidently her form of nerve derivative, and seems to have been her foible, her folly, in earlier days when her fate still hung in the balance; for Germans do not believe in, and are deeply outraged by, any signs of unseemly haste. Hers is a story of a coterie a large and important coterie, of course, but one that but for some con- tentious souls in England and an accident of succes- sion would have remained a coterie, and whose members could by no possibility have got mixed up with the Royal Family of Great Britain. And when it came to the point, the heroine of a German 224 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvn palace scandal could not be Queen of England. It is possible that if Sophia Dorothea had known or realized how near it was to her, if the truculent figure of the old Electress had not stood, all through her hot and heady years, in front of her, a solid block to her hopes of a queenly future, she would have been more careful, and would have sacrificed love to ambition. But nothing seemed less likely than that George disagreeable, stockish, drunken, mulish George should have a crown to give or withhold, as a reward for good Court behaviour. No, Sophia Dorothea was just the rich heiress and only daughter of the Duke of Zell, and George was the mumpish son of the Electress, who might par impossible have some day to go over and reign in Great Britain. So old Sophia, while despising young Sophia's mother, the Frenchwoman, schemed to get the daughter's dowry for her son. And the poor little girl was brought from Celle, where a certain decency reigned, and pitchforked into the Electoral Court of Hanover, where she promptly went wrong. But her dowry was secured, and she now might be committed for any simple crime, tried by court-martial, and whistled off, as indeed she was. Konigsmarck was a pretext ; he was the usual adventurer, but the flighty woman loved him, and I think he loved her. I do not fancy that she was really at all interesting. She was very big and white and black-haired, with rolling black eyes. It is easy to see from her letters that her French mother had formed her in her own image, and that in itself must have been an offence. She was too CH. xvii] QUEENS DISCROWNED 225 " previous " ; she was resented as an early French fashion is sometimes resented in crassly suburban circles. She began by flirting outrageously with everybody, lying in bed all day, dancing all night, and " crabbing " the clothes of the ladies of the Court, notoriously those of Countess Platen, her rival in her husband's affection, and those of her father-in-law. She mocked her husband's mother, she mocked every- body and everything, she behaved like a naughty child, until the passion for Konigsmarck took hold of her, and she became jealous and vapourish and tragic. She bolted once like any schoolgirl when they had all been too severe with her, and went home to her mother. But her husband, the Elector, ordered her back, and her mother was afraid to keep her. She took post-horses, and went back in a rage. I think I see her, rushing full tilt past the " in- laws'" palace of Herrenhausen, which is a short mile from Hanover and on the way to the Leine Schloss, the royal palace, where she was bound to rejoin her peevish little husband. In Herrenhausen there sat the crusty old Electress, waiting to be propitiated by the naughty daughter-in-law's stop- ping to pay her respects. I see the little French fury, enraged at her recall, putting her black head out of the carriage window, and bidding the postilions drive straight on. I see all the expectant heads of the Electress's household craning out of the windows as the daughter-in-law and her escort were whirled past, and I hear the fateful pronounce- ment of the savage old woman, openly defied by the daughter of the little " clot of dirt." So she styled the Duchess of Celle. That the daughter of the 15 226 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvn French lady, who had got herself somehow or other into the family, should ever be Queen of England her own darling dream of succession voided for her by her own death was what the Electress, known as "the friend of the philosopher Leibnitz," but a narrow-minded old woman all the same, set herself all along to prevent. The doom of Sophia Dorothea may have been sealed from this moment of defiance. Less than a year after she was to be the uncrowned Queen of England, and reign merely over a sullen marsh. These family jealousies were, of course, not all. There generally is to be found a splendid adven- turer at the back of these fair outcasts from royal Edens guarded by flaming swords. Three gentle- men of fortune were connected with the three ladies I have mentioned. Bergami, the wretched Italian chamberlain and supposed lover of Caroline of England, may be reckoned negligible, but Both- well, Konigsmarck, and I will add Struensee, that cunning doctor who became a Minister, " the blood- red ray in the spectrum " of the life of Caroline Matilda, a Stuart on the mother's side, and Sophia Dorothea's ancestress these gentlemen were kindred spirits. They were, nearly all of them, not so much in love with the Queen that stooped, as anxious to use her favour for their own ends of ambition. There is no doubt that Bothwell found Mary Stuart a great drag on his domestic bliss ; he much preferred his own wife, a Huntley, to the royal lady he was so busily exploiting. Of Count Struensee, too, the ex-physician, Caroline Matilda was not much more than a political pawn. Out of CH. xvn] QUEENS DISCROWNED 227 all the three Philip, Count Konigsmarck, was the most ardent, the most reckless, the least calculating. For though we have, naturally, Mary Stuart's " dead give-away," the famous Casket letters, which I for my part believe to be genuine, where are the letters of Bothwell to Mary ? Was not the astute Borderer too cautious to write letters, and did he not plead the rough, unskilled hand of a man of the moss- hags ? But Konigsmarck' s letters to Sophia Dorothea are extant, each one a hanging matter. And hers to him were found by the late Mr. W. H. Wilkins in the University Library of Lund, in Sweden. He translated them. These letters breathe, hers and his, a savage and tender passion that is incontest- ably genuine, love marred by temper, vanity, and sensuality, but still love, that rises some- times to wild heights of selflessness. They amply prove the point, which, as usual in these cases, some Sophiolaters are found to contest. Hear what our superior moralist, Thackeray, says about it : " Innocent I I remember, as a boy, how a great party persisted in declaring Caroline of Brunswick was a martyred angel. So was Helen of Greece innocent. She never ran away with Paris, the dangerous young Trojan. Menelaus, her husband, ill-used her, and there never was any siege of Troy at all. So was Bluebeard's wife innocent. She never peeped into the closet where the other wives were with their heads cut off. She never dropped the key, or stained it with blood, and her brothers were quite right in finishing Bluebeard. Yes, Caro- line of Brunswick was innocent, and Madame Laffage 228 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvn never poisoned her husband, and Mary of Scotland never blew up hers, and poor Sophia Dorothea was never unfaithful, and Eve never took the apple it was all a cowardly fabrication of the serpent's." It is all very amusing, but surely the ironic method was never so laid on with a trowel before ! Thack- eray was shocked. He was very Early Victorian, and so that was easily done. Sophia Dorothea was very different from Amelia, and her home life at Celle and Hanover not at all like Amelia's in Russell Square. Thackeray shouts praise grudgingly of his German heroine : " How madly true the woman is, and how astoundingly she lies !" Amelia was true, but soberly, and never, as children would say, "lied big." She was not a tragic heroine at all, except, perhaps, for one moment at Waterloo. And yet we see, as we are able to do, with tragic heroines, whose letters get published, how petty are the causes leading to the difficulties which broaden out to such issues of life and death. Sophia Dorothea worried, bullied, nagged, and practically hunted her man to his doom. It is fairly obvious in such corrupt entourage as hers and she saw it, too, when not blinded by jealous fury that if she had allowed KOnigsmarck to be civil, in the then received manner, to her father-in-law's ugly, all-powerful mistress and favourite, Countess von Platen, the Count would have lived to run away with her to France or England, or even to the enlightened Court of Wolfenbuttel* Duke Antony of Ulrich, the * It was in a precisely similar way that Guillem de Cabestaing, the noble troubadour, was discovered by the husband of the Princess he adored. He wrote various poems to her ladies in CH. XVH] QUEENS DISCROWNED 229 enemy of Hanover, lived there, the dissipated dilettante relation who afterwards cast his niece's adventures in the form of a romance, and passed it round to all the Courts of Europe, who were deeply interested. Evasion was their plan, frustrated by the follies of both. It was more or less arranged between them and it was a plan that had recommended itself to the worldly hard-headed adventurer that he should accept some of the Countess Platen's frequent invitations to supper the public ones, where each man took his lady to dine at some cabaretier en ville for all the world as people make up to go to " some low restaurant " nowadays, and the private ones as well in La Platen's " castle behind the mill" to supper. KOnigsmarck was a success at these parties, except when the Electoral Princess of Hanover had scolded him. Then he undid his work, refusing to sit down to the collation, walking about the room singing, or throwing himself down among the new-mown hay in the garden and not saying a word till it was time to go. He was the handsomest man in Europe, and Europe spoilt him. Sophia Dorothea had written to him : " What ? Go to La Platen's supper party two hours after I had gone, and when you had bidden me so tender a farewell ? You had no end of pretexts for declining order to ward off suspicion, alleging to his mistress that these were the common and necessary politenesses of the day. She, however, insisted that he must address to her still more passionate poems, and one stanza in the famous verses beginning " Li dous cossire," betrayed the troubadour to the husband, who cut out his heart, and made the lady drink his blood. J. L. F. M. H. 230 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvn that supper party, and yet you went ! I tremble for the future." And well she might. And this after another letter, which runs : " Don't be so silly as to keep away from La Platen altogether. ... It is most important to keep her in a good humour; therefore, for the sake of our love, go there as before." Konigsmarck, to please her, insists on forswearing the Countess, and she writes again to rebuke him for his submission to her orders : " I am sorry that you no longer go to Countess Platen's ; it is rather important that you should go." " Don't think of inducing me to return to La Platen. . . ." Konigsmarck replies. " You will not catch me that way any more." And further, to pacify the jealous lady, he adds the detail of the Platen's "ridiculous yellow cloak." The silly Princess jumps at it. Quick comes her reply, she is "his, all his." For her mother-in-law, the Electress, has corroborated his strictures on the cloak, telling Sophia's mother " that nothing could be more hideous " than the said cloak. The magic of the spiteful innuendo does not last. Konigsmarck gives a party, and omits to mention the fact that he has invited La Platen to it. " So the whole thing was got up for her !" is the conclusion Sophia Dorothea jumps to, and, very meanly, throws a potential rival in his face. " Fortune," she says, " to give me revenge, has sent hither to-day a young baron from Mayence." How truly tragic it all is the useful "young baron from Mayence," La Platen's yellow cloak, Konigsmarck sulking among the haycocks to placate CH. xvn] QUEENS DISCROWNED 231 his beloved, in the face of the dangers the two were running! A lazy, idle Court, full of spies, drink, gambling, sensuality run riot how could a fairly pure passion be allowed to subsist? For it is obvious, as even Thackeray admits, that these two were passionately attached and that the Princess was devoted to " Lothario." (One knew that Thack- eray would have had nothing better to do than to call him Lothario !) He writes, humbly and patheti- cally, as to the social event which had upset Sophia Dorothea so much. " My banquet, as you call it, was a very dull affair. ... La Platen came with her husband." And he tells the exigeante beauty, once for all, what his social philosophy is. It is quite in order for the present day. So might a modern Belgravian, called to account by " his great friend," try to get into her obstinate head the " cutlet-for- cutlet " theory : "My reason for giving the supper party was because I am going away so soon " (to the wars, not to the moors), " and it was the right thing to do. I have been so often to their dinners that it was necessary for me to make some return. Do not think I did it to court anyone, or with any thought of intrigue. I vow, on my perdition, it was not so. . . . As a man, I am compelled to do many things that you, as a woman, need not do. ... Sometimes we must worship the devil, lest he should harm us." It must be admitted that Konigsmarck went a very long way with the devil. That sinister castle behind the mill, deep embowered in trees, secluded, dark, where the jolly Countess entertained her favourites "To damn me," says poor Konigsmarck, "she 232 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvn asked me to supper there." And he adds in self- deprecation, half sullen, half combative, since the lady herself had counselled the step : " It was a gross insult to my love for you, for which I mean to see you at my feet, begging my pardon. . . . You cannot love me as much as I love you, for at your bidding I have sinned against my love for you." Yes, it was high policy, to dignify by that name a low form of courtier-like trimming, higher than the egotistic Princess could stand, although she had cynically counselled it. And the doomed Konigs- marck comes to see clearly how she is likely to react. He, moreover, sincerely loathes himself for his paltering with the evil one. He ends by vowing first on his perdition, then on his salvation, that he will see the Countess no more, be the consequences what they may. " I will never see her again, though it ruin me." It did ruin him. If he had even stuck to that bold attitude he announced, it might have availed him somewhat. But he continued to kow-tow to the favourite in a faint-hearted way, and the favourite, preserving her weakness for him, held her hand for a space. At last the Princess, committing herself to her mad passion before the eyes of the whole Court, contrived so to rub in the fact of his infidelity to La Platen yes, it had all the while looked like that to the Countess, who, considering herself sure of his heart, had doubtless winked at and permitted a courtier-like adoration of the Electoral Princess as the proper attitude of an adventurer that she at last decided to destroy him, fresh from the arms of her rival. At least, that is the story. No one really CH. xvn] QUEENS DISCROWNED 233 knows how it went, that summer night in June, after which Konigsmarck was not seen again. But this is how tradition says she managed it. Four clumsy halberdiers, lent to La Platen by the sleepy old Elector, her lover, whom she disturbed with a scandalous tale of his Captain of the Guard, alone with his imprudent daughter-in-law at the dead hour of night. . . . These men were to arrest Konigsmarck, to take him dead or alive. . . . They took him dead. An ambush behind the great con- venient stove in the Rittersaal through which the happy lover must pass on his way out, a blow in the back, a lighted torch held up, and the most beautiful face in the world everybody grants him that spoilt, trodden under an angry, revengeful woman's heel ! Then, a flag taken up, some quick- lime, and all quiet when day dawned. . . . And Sophia Dorothea left, with his parting kisses on her lips, among her torn-up compromising papers some of them only torn across, or we should have no data and her jewel caskets, and other prepara- tions for to-morrow's flight, probably lay down to snatch a few moments' sleep, expecting to be roused next morning early by that little note from her lover that was to be the signal for her departure the note that never came. Knesebeck, La Confidante, heard sounds in the night, but thought nothing of them. . . . It was a fortnight before Sophia Dorothea, kept a prisoner in her wing of the old Leine Schloss, knew that her lover was lost. And not then officially. Everybody all over Europe, led by his sister, the amiable adventuress, Aurora von Konigsmarck, was 234 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvn hunting for the Elector's handsome Colonel of the Guards. But a sardonic remark of that potentate's, reported to her, must have left her with small doubt. It was to the effect that Konigsmarck was not likely to appear again in Hanover. However, Sophia Dorothea was kept shut up, her children were not allowed to see her, she knew nothing of the robust Aurora's hearty search for her brother. Such re- finements of cruelty were permissible in these vicious little circles. The amenities of small ducal Courts must have been very like those of neighbour- ing tribes of savages, and the constant haggling over Sophia Dorothea and her money, at the time of her marriage and at the time of her divorce, might be fairly translated by the rites of marriage-by- capture, the raids of " braves," and the exchanging of cows and women in Zululand. In the Princess's despair, she threw the cup after the platter, as the saying is, and played into her cunning husband's hands. He wanted to get rid of her and keep her money. He did not want to mention the Konigsmarck affair, it was repugnant to his pride, and if the Princess could be strengthened in her expressed determination not to return to her husband, she could then be easily put away for desertion, according to the German law. The name of Konigsmarck was skilfully kept out of it, the confidante was made the scapegoat and imprisoned. It was Frau von Knesebeck's counsels which had corrupted the Princess, who was sent into exile at Lauennau "until such time as she returns to her duties with the Electoral Prince." A farce! he wanted none of her duties; he had the Maypole CH. xvn] QUEENS DISCROWNED 235 and the Maypole's child. The divorce proceedings that were then inaugurated were a farce, as divorce proceedings so often are. The Celle people, repre- sented by her indefatigable mother, the Duchess Eleonore, wanted a separation ; the Hanoverians, that is to say her husband, a divorce. The ill- advised Princess readily gave him his wish. She believed that freedom would follow the pronouncing of the divorce. So she duly showed a rebellious spirit contumada and declared freely to the com- missioners that nothing would induce her to return to her Electoral consort. Later, like Mary Stuart, Sophia Dorothea intrigued constantly for freedom, but attempts to escape, conducted by letter, were not a hanging matter, and, besides, all her friends turned out to be in the pay of her enemies, except the plucky Knesebeck, who escaped from prison and worked hard for her mistress. I should like to have known Knesebeck. She stood up so gallantly for the theory of the Princess's innocence, and whether that theory was tenable or not, it was right and fitting for La Con- fidante to hold it. Another person held the theory and supported it in a book. But then, as the shrewd old Duchess of Orleans observed, "it was only to save the honour of the house." This was a relation, the literary Duke, Antony Ulrich of Wolfenbiittel. His novel was called "Octavia." It was that exceed- ingly modern performance, a roman a clef. Sophia Dorothea figures as the Princess Solane; her husband, George Louis, is romantically disguised as Prince Cotys. Konigsmarck is Eaquilius. This 236 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvn official account of a world-renowned family incident was read eagerly by every Court in Europe. The Duchess of Orleans, like any gossiping, idle old lady of our day, anxious to be amused in her twilight of life she was a great stirabout in her time writes to yes, actually the Electress Sophia, the mother of Cotys, and mother-in-law of Solane, saying : " I am going to read the ' Octavia ' over again, as George Louis yes, actually George Louis himself! has been good enough to send me the key to it." (The cynicism of this would have delighted Thackeray.) " Duke Ulrich makes Solane appear innocent," she adds, unkindly suggesting the obvious family reason for his backing. She is diplomatic about George Louis, as she is writing to the youth's mother. "Cotys," she observes, " Cotys, I consider, cold not brutal." Not brutal ! And while she wrote, perhaps the uncrowned Queen was driving furiously down the road to the bridge at Hayden, with her escort of drawn swords, and black despair in her heart ! And then the Duchess has another dig at the victim of the coldness of Prince Cotys. " Duke Christian looks on it as an improvement that she stuck to one in particular." Now the good Duchess herselt admits to "finding safety in numbers." She is, moreover, curious as to whether George Louis, who so obligingly furnishes the key to the urgent family document, has any hankering to see his wife, " who is still beautiful." Yes, Sophia Dorothea is fifty, and she is still beautiful, and if, when he succeeded to the throne CH. xvii] QUEENS DISCROWNED 237 of Great Britain, George Louis could have taken her with him as his consort, it would have helped to popularize the Hanoverian regime. But no one ever said he wasn't shrewd, and he knew the sort of woman he had to deal with. He knew Sophia Dorothea, her bitter French tongue, her German obstinacy, and he thought it safer to give out that he was a widower, or, if he had a wife, that she was mad. He made both excuses, apparently. The Jacobites would peck at him either way. At the same time, he had the Queen guarded even more closely than before, as closely as he dared, without, at the same time, injuring her health. He had a purely selfish reason for this ; a fortune-teller had assured him that he would not survive her six months. Prince Cotys valued life. And when Sophia Dorothea died, she raved, she denounced her husband, and she wrote, the story says, a letter to be delivered after her death. It was delivered, nine months after, to the King, when he landed on his biennial visit to Hanover. It gave him the stroke from which he did not recover. It is almost too dramatic to be true. It is difficult to believe that an omen could be so fully justified. But dates do not lie no, not if you get them right, which I always find difficulty in doing. Without being a Sophiolater, I was deeply interested in this story of social doom and murder, and in my own way. I was chaffed, as I suppose Mariolaters and even Sophiolaters have been, and will be, chaffed to the end of time, by people whose imaginative faculty cannot be set going by anything but tragedies where the element of heroism or 238 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvn grandeur comes in. My friends kindly escorted me to Hanover, that I might batten upon the relics and evidences of the culte which it pleases them to say is mine ; but they did not contrive that my morbid tastes should be fully fed and gratified by a sight of the very flag in the corridor of the Rittersaal (the corridor is parqueted now) under which lies the body of Konigsmarck, the man who wrote those letters, the man who flirted with Countess Platen, the man who noticed the yellow cloak, the man whose mouth was stamped upon, who was hastily sepultured, doused with quicklime on that night in June. This particular spot in the old Leine Schloss was the eye of the picture, and I was never inside the Leine Schloss ! As we drove to Herrenhausen we were due to pass it, so the guide-books said, but the guide-books were in German. Not until after the heat and the battle of the day were over, when things had been missed, and the conduct of the excursion open to be severely criticized by the people who had been glad to profit by some self- constituted cicerone's superior knowledge of German and historical proportion, did I realize the omission. What we did on that warm April day was to drive in a hired fly solemnly round the residential quarter of Hanover for an hour. This is the only way to learn what Germany really is so my German friends told me. I did not deny it, only the suburbs of a town are depressing everywhere, and a drive in a taxicab round and round, say, Hamilton Terrace or Addison Road would produce just the same effect, and stand for Germany just as well.* * A reasonable interest in the monuments of the past is a very proper thing, but to confuse the disorderly array of houses which CH. XVH] QUEENS DISCROWNED 239 On the road to Herrenhausen, under the long bordered avenue, that reminded me of the old Birdcage Walk, we did pass a dull, ugly, negligible building, and the eager, polite Kutscher made a small detour to drive us past the fa$ade, where the White Horse of Hanover stood and ramped like a great grey full-fed ghost. The horse was impres- sive, and reconciled me to the detour, and that was all. But this was the old Leine Schloss, modernized outside, but practically unchanged within. Here this congeries of ill-conditioned, ill-tempered people lived and loved and festered in their unwholesome pleasures and shabby squalid vices. The family history of this family beats most hideous family histories, bating that of the Cenci and the House of Judah. Well, there it was, all these tragedy folk had pattered about, been born, married, murdered, and died in their sanctimonious beds here. They had, worthy and unworthy, all " dreed their weird " behind these grey, unattractive walls. And I was driven past it ! Joseph Leopold, you see, had the guide-books, and he did not care for the old shell, the withered slough of squalid, politically unin- teresting folk. are to be found in the London suburbs with the carefully-planned and extremely interesting groups of dwellings that surround modern German cities is evidence of a mind ill-trained to observa- tion in its infancy and unaware of the most urgent of civic problems of the present day. The outskirts of Hanover are the very best model for the outskirts of London. And just as this city in the past gave to England reasonable and utilitarian rulers, so she might to-day to the same country give plans for a reason- able and utilitarian development of modern cities, which can never be very romantic things. J. L. F. M. H. 240 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvn I told him a little story of my youth. I had a witty mother, and I had what was known as the Irving craze very badly in my girlhood. I had just seen the " divine " actor in " Richard III," and I was taken over Barnard Castle, in Yorkshire, one of the palaces of the Kingmaker. I betrayed an unusual interest in historical detail concerning the Tudors, the Nevilles, and the House of York. I plagued everybody for information. I insisted on going over the ruined castle from garret to oubliette. I bored the party, who wanted food and less historical detail. At my last question my mother turned. " Yes," she said, " Henry Irving did give this castle to Miss Isabel Bateman and now let's all go and have tea." The disappointment about the Leine Schloss was wiped out a little farther along the road. We came to Herrenhausen. A yellowish, fawn-coloured building of a cheap style and fabric, low and crouching that is how the Stammhaus of the Hanoverian Kings of England appeared to me. I did not think it so very like Kensington Palace : I had always been told it was a copy. Kensington Palace is stately, rather high, of a dark, dignified red brick. The stateliness of Kensington may be due to the new chimney-stacks added in Early Victorian days to the commanding ridge of the coping-stones all along the face, and tinkered up quite lately since it became a museum ; but the mean, cheap-looking yellow -and -white plaster that covers the bulk of the palace of Herren- hausen hopelessly belittles it. All the German palaces are said to be copies of Versailles ; Kensing- CH. xvn] QUEENS DISCROWNED 241 ton Palace is far more like Versailles than Herren- hausen. We drove, as it seemed to me, for nearly a quarter of a mile, along a low range of little houses like a row of pitmen's cottages in England, but painted yellow and white in a garish crudity that would not appeal to Englishmen. These little one-storied dwellings, one door, two windows, built obviously for coachmen and officials attached to the royal service, led the eye gradually up to a main building into which they melted, and I said : " This must be Herrenhausen." Kensington Palace necessarily housed its multi- plicity of officials, its grooms and stablemen, but their establishments do not, and did not, form part of the main facade. The arrangement of the German palace is less snobbish perhaps. We know the Georges were very simple folk. There is a humble building just inside the great gate of Kensington Gardens where one used to buy soda water, and ginger beer, and gingerbread biscuits in 1870. It was then exactly like the little erections of which I speak that are annexed to the palace of the Georges in Herrenhausen. In Ken- sington Gardens the little square box of a house still stands, but it is no longer painted yellow, and I don't think you can get soda water there any more. We got out. The palace in front of us gleamed a chalky white and yellow in the raw spring sunlight. There was an acre of small cobblestones in front of it, and a sufficiency of ostler's pails and pumps, with brooms propped up against them. No human being could be seen. The windows all had formal linen 16 242 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvn blinds, and these blinds were drawn. The palace is not shown. It is not shown because it is actually inhabited by the owner, and yet it is empty. There was nothing very romantic about the Lust- haus of a fat, stupid, boozy family like that of the Georges; but now for the first time romance has entered its doors. This is what I thought when Joseph Leopold told me the reason of the present state of affairs. Herrenhausen is the property of an exile for conscience' sake, the Duke of Cumberland, the proscribed King of Hanover.* He cannot live in his own house, in his own kingdom, because he is subject to arrest. He refuses, and has refused for years, to take the oath of allegiance to Prussia. How very vital looking on this death in life of a fair mansion, this shell of an ineffectual royalty seemed the principle for which this man and his family are fighting, and for whose abstract sake endure an honoured but nomadic existence. You might have met the dispossessed Duke anywhere during the last twenty years in England, opening bazaars, at the baths and cures of his country, at any of its cities excepting the one city where he properly belonged. You might have met him in Berlin on the Unter den Linden, maybe. I fancy the Kaiser and he were not bad friends ; they were, at any rate, relatives. Yet if he had walked into his own principality of Hanover, he was liable to be arrested at sight like a malefactor. He has chosen his line. Herrenhausen is inhabited, though no one * This was written in 1912. CH. xvn] QUEENS DISCROWNED 243 is in it. At his other country seat, Wilhelmsberg, he keeps thirty beds made up. All this is on the chance of his being able, through some change in the political arena, to swoop down upon his own and occupy it. Is it not romantic to think that in this opportunist age there is still a potentate who prefers exile to abasement ? Our Kutscher was excessively anxious that we should first of all visit the towering glass-domed conservatory opposite the palace, which was built and presented to the inhabitants of Hanover by their very generous Prince, but the mere sight of it made my eyes ache. So we paid him and allowed him to abandon us in front of the building, in the fond hope that he had brought us where we wished to be to the haven of our desires. Remember, he had been bidden to drive us round the suburbs of Hanover, merely taking the old town on our way He must have been terribly out in his calculations of our tastes. But we walked on. We passed the glass house of the Duke of Cumberland we have no better at Kew. We never looked round, or else we should have seen our cicerone's despair of his clients' curious obtuseness and faulty sense of direction. And in that part of the gardens, so casually attained to, I had a vision or shall I call it an Adventure? not of Versailles, but of Herrenhausen. I seemed to myself to be in a dream, as I walked soberly, quiet as a tourist mouse, by the side of Joseph Leopold. I did not even take his arm, though I was possessed by a strange emotion of fear lest I should totter, and call for support during this excur- sion into my sub-consciousness, as indeed it was. 244 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvn Supposing I felt the need for readjustment of time and space, of the past with the present, I might grasp this kind German convexity, and be saved from falling. But I hoped all the while that this would not happen, for I was enjoying the furtive emotion raised in me with all my might of conscious sensation. We were walking, actually, in a small rectangular garden, bordered on one side by high-cut hedges, and on the other by low pollarded willows on the edge of what I apprehended then to be water, though, as a matter of fact, I believe there was no water there. The lowness of the willows and the light of flatness reminded me of a Dutch landscape. And the semi-enclosed space where we were walking suggested the foreground of a piece of medieval tapestry, with its weft of dull green and warp of strange, vividly picked out flowers. There is a Morris wallpaper called " The Daisy" that was constantly hung and renewed in my old home, which has something of the same effect as the parterre in which Joseph Leopold and I were now walking. There were two narrow and rectangular strips of grass, dotted, spotted in the regular medieval fashion of tapestry, with yellow and white flowers borne up on strong, limber, upstanding stems, like the spears of grass that interspersed them, which was likewise firm and broad and tall. And at the end of the formal strip, lost, diminished, in a sort of exaggerated dream perspective, was a small grey Greek Temple. It occupied the whole breadth of the end of the rectangular strip of green, and it had a background of dark sacrificial trees. I think they were yews, CH. xvii] QUEENS DISCROWNED 245 And we walked orderly along. I fancy at one point there was a kind of check to the integrity of my vision the sight of our late Kutscher, standing by the opening in the yew hedge, waving his arms, and crying, " Nicht da ! Nicht da 1" We had passed the glass dome unnoticed, and were walking in a mere wilderness of strongweeds daisies and dande- lions ! On my bemused ears, too, there smote the healthy sound of the whetstone at work on one of the gardeners' scythes. But we walked on towards the Temple that stood for us like a full stop of solemnity to the flowery commas that led up to it. It was merely a tool- house where wheelbarrows and mowing machines were propped against Ionic columns green with damp, but it had served probably for all sorts of lumbering German fetes champetres, and there peri- wigged gentlemen and painted, patched ladies had " languidly adjusted their vapid loves." Now, small, grey, pose, sinister, serious, it served to put the finishing touch to the submergence of my con- sciousness under waves of memory. I definitely then lost all sense of time and place, as I walked along, self-supporting, beside Joseph Leopold. The Kutscher with the waving arms faded away, the sound of the scythe being sharpened somewhere in the neighbourhood to cut down the robust flowers and grass died out, and I became again a child in Kensington Gardens, unconscious of impressions, as all children are, but possessed of the usual plastic memory that stores up unvalued mind-pictures wherewith to overwhelm the mature intelligence in the years to 246 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvn come. For the scene was so nearly identical as to act as a reminder. But in those days, instead of Joseph Leopold and the Kutscher, there was a palace official, and two German nurses talking to each other on the other side of a slight iron fence composed of two thin transverse bars, and four small children divided equally by these bars. The two, of which I was one, were in stout boots and socks, and bore hoops and hoopsticks, the other two were throned in a chaise drawn by a white donkey. There was a red-brick palace in the back- ground and a Greek Temple in plaster behind. A babel of different German patois rent the air. The two children inside were very young, and only liked their hands stroked. They were little Tecks, and the palace was Kensington Palace. But the Westphalian nurse of the children of Alfred Hunt, the painter, could not long be allowed to exchange ideas and dialects with the Hessian nurse of the future Queen of England, and the stern official in charge of the little royal party warned our Milly from Paderborn that it must not be. The white donkey on this last morning of many mornings passed on firmly and finally. But not until I left that rectangular strip of grass and flowers did I become middle-aged again, and Joseph Leopold never knew, only was a little mildly interested when I gripped his arm and pointed at the Temple just as a few drops of rain began to fall. In the days to which I had been temporarily switched back we should have taken refuge nurse, children, perambulator, and all in that temple, and bored ourselves with playing hide- CH. xvn] QUEENS DISCROWNED 247 and-seek round the pillars. There were plenty of Greek Temples like this in Kensington Gardens in the old times. . . . A little later on, in the tiny family museum at Herrenhausen, I took licence to linger long over certain presses full of mouldy faded garments of all sorts coats, laced with pale gold and silver, that had graced a George's broad chest, and narrow- chested, high -shouldered dresses that had held the firm, proud flesh of Queens, but now flapped dispiritedly on hooks or on dummies that seemed to shrink away and refuse to bear out these royal rags with any pride. I noticed during a lull of the irritating old ex-military custodian's voice a velvet cape, of a faded, mousy brown. Its paleness moved me more than eloquence. I remember wearing one very like it myself in the fifteen years ago that seems now so much more early than even Early Victorian. This little wretched wrap was hidden away behind some garments that had belonged to Caroline Matilda, Sophia's ancestress, and another discrowned Queen. Caroline Matilda was the sister of George the Third. She was supposed to be beautiful, but she had thick lips and a stumpy figure. It is possible to judge, for she was evidently a very "dressy" sort of person, so that clothes of hers are constantly cropping up in museums. She was supposed to be clever, for she could quote " To be or not to be " very much a tort et a travers. They married her to a sottish King Christian of Sweden, whose mother Juliana got rid of her on a possibly trumped- up story of infidelity as soon as was convenient, 248 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvn executed her supposed lover, and bestowed the daughter-in-law with her Hanoverian relations for the end of her days. She would have fared worse if she had not been a daughter of England and a subject for the interposition of Lord Keith, England's Ambassador. Both their dreary Queenships must have wor- shipped in the hideous Reckitt's-blue-tinged chapel at Celle, and prayed, kneeling in their little close, stuffy, royal pews, for moral support and better days that never came, adding, if one knows them at all, a touch of the Commination Service a Taddresse of spiteful stepmothers - in - law, named respectively Sophia and Juliana. Both must have dragged their ugly, heavy clothes and heavier hearts along the pleached walks among the boxwood mazes of the Palace of Herrenhausen, must have appeared, and disappeared and reappeared again behind those high charmilles, designed, one supposes, to mask secret meetings, but where the singed moths of scandal now wander alone. For what courtier would dare to repeat the disastrous flirtations that had cost both Konigsmarck and Struensee their lives ? One dress, labelled as that of Caroline Matilda's, looked as if the careless, despairing wearer had subjected it to very rough treatment. The delicate peach-blossom silk had been dragged through wastes of autumn leaves. I was sure of it. It was spring now, but I knew the place where, in the fall of the year, the brown, dusty, parchment-like flakes must have lain in heaving drifts under the trees that had borne them. When the custodian was not attending, I stooped CH. xvn] QUEENS DISCROWNED 249 and examined the hem of that dress. Yes, it was discoloured, and it turned up, weakly, pathetically, just as my own dresses do if I let them trail in in- appropriate places. The years were dissolved, for the moment, as the custodian droned on about the glories of some royal George or other, male relations of this oppressed female of their blood. There was so little between me, a woman, staring through to the past, with a travel-stained skirt on of my own probably, and another woman, who had been so unhappy, some hundred years ago or so, that she had not troubled to hold up her gown asshe tramped aimlessly through an autumn-coloured park, the fallen leaves billowing, flying up all round her knees, clad in the neglected peach-blossom silk that didn't matter now that she was alone. Yes, I am sure she walked alone. She was thinking of the days when things were " nicer," as women say, when she walked in the gardens at Kew or Kensing- ton, and there were no dead leaves, and but servile people buzzing about her listening politely to her misquotations of Shakespeare. Or later, of the short, sweet time in Copenhagen, when she was a crowned Queen, with a disagreeable mother-in-law, a brutish husband, but consideration and a crown ! Now ! I tucked the dress back in the glass cupboard, and sneaked back into the wake of the custodian, feeling chilly and grown old. CHAPTER XVIII BONES, BABIES, AND ANABAPTISTS " THERE are in Monster, where we are going, two hundred and sixty-nine of my relations!"* Joseph Leopold observed, as the train ambled along by the side of the vast northern heath the Liineburger Heide which corresponds somewhat to the New Forest in England. It is, to my mind, a much more heathy heath than the New Forest, which contains every kind of scenery, except mountain scenery and trees and rivers and plenty of those park-like enclosures dear to the land-agent. The Liineburger Heath is just an immense tract of land covered with low, scrubby, arid-looking under- growth, where stooping turf-cutters heap up heavy clods and gather sticks and cut the ling into bundles to make beds for their cattle and perhaps for them- selves. I answered politely, as I sat beside him and looked out of the window : " And shall I have to know them all ?" " Eventually. We must go soon and formally pay our respects to my cousin A , the head of * There are 316.]. L. F. M. H. 250 CH. xvm] ANABAPTISTS 251 our house. But to-day I am going to show you Miinster, and it will be amusing to see how many head of relation I can pass in the streets while I am going about with you incognito. I want to see those low quiet arches all along the main street where the Anabaptists made their last stand, and were cut down as they ran in and out, behind and past, the pillars." " What I want to see are the bones of John of Leyden in the iron cage slung on to the church tower. You are certain they are still there ?" " Surely ! They were there, gleaming white among the jackdaws, when I was a boy," replied Joseph Leopold staidly. He was all right as regards the relations. They were everywhere. They might have been the off- spring of John of Leyden and his innumerable wives. Did we take shelter in the old palace during a shower, and did we tenant the old pilasters of the porte cochere in company of a whole meiny of pig- tailed schoolgirls who were set down by a zealous schoolmistress to draw these pillars till that the shower should leave off Joseph Leopold would nudge me, and pointing out one of these pig- tailed Madchen " That's one !" Or did we cross the street and duck under the shadow of the dark historic arches we had come to see, a lame man with a child would be looking in at a pastry-cook's window " That's Cousin A and his little grand- child." Or did we meet, a little way out, towards the public gardens, a young lady going to seek her partners in a game of tennis " That's one of Fritz's girls." Or a beautiful mature woman seen through 252 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvm the windows of the confectioner's where she is ordering her Kuchen for tea is " My Cousin Laura." " It was uncles, uncles, everywhere, And cousins flung in my path like mad." Presently I was bidden to look into a shop window and see the page of the Munster Daily Journal, owned, edited, and printed by one of my new relations. Then I was taken to see the dreary but handsome hospital given by the family collec- tively. Then to the large family mansion in the Palladian style was it ? where " My grand uncle " lived and died, and the church " My people " had built and the other church that they preferred to worship in. All this ancestor-worship left me rather cold ; I am, as I have said, of the undomestic race that scorns family ties. At last we came to the Servatii Platz, a little green triangle at the back door of that old family mansion. Here, to this lonely square of carefully tended green grass, every little Joseph Leopold, including the one who was telling me about it, is taken out at a certain ap- propriate age, with every formality, to make his first tottering footsteps, there where his father and his grandfather made theirs, in leading-strings and supported by parents and grandparents and a proud, responsible nurse. And when I had heard all about the ancestor who was Burgomaster of Munster, and who had to drink a whole silver cock full of wine at one draught under pain of forfeiting his proud position, and had been shown the very silver cock, preserved in the Friedensaal, I was allowed to gratify my own CH. xvmj ANABAPTISTS 253 morbid tastes, raise my eyes, and, removing my centre of interest from these family matters, look up at the tall tower of St. Servatius and pick out the cage containing the bones of John of Leyden and his lieutenant Knipperdolling. John of Leyden, the tailor, alias John Bockelson, alias the King of Righteousness, alias the King of Zion, must have been a very terrible, forcible villain, strong, proud, and lustful. He came, a refugee from Leyden, along with his first lieutenant, a baker from Haarlem, to avoid the persecutions going on there against the Reformed Religion, and chose Munster in Westphalia, because Munster was favourable to the new ideas, and had lately taken the strong step of turning its Catholic Bishop out of the city. But the citizens had hardly bargained for the lusty tailor in his stead. The baker from Haarlem having been killed in a sortie, John chose another lieutenant, a draper this time, with the ridiculous name of Knipperdolling. Yes, they are comic characters enough, both of them, till we think of the red-hot pincers and knives for flaying and the iron cages hung high on St. Ludgerius, with the few white bones lying on the barred floor, dropping gradually through the chinks on to the heads of the exces- sively Catholic posterity below. For as good Mrs. Markham remarks : " Munster, ever since that time, has been one of the most bigoted popish cities in Europe." That is the way it always is, and that is why the Joseph Leopolds pullulate in it. The new chief of insurrection began his reign by running stark naked about the streets of Munster, 254 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvm screaming that the King of Zion had come, while Knipperdolling incited the mob to pull down the steeples. Then began a period of almost incredible laisser aller. "As," Mrs. Markham says, but is unable to go into the reasons thereof ifor fear of shocking young George and Mary, " the number of females who flocked to the enfranchised town of Monster was six times greater than that of the men," John counted it politicable and indeed necessary to decree that all men should treat themselves to a plurality of wives. He took to himself seventeen. . . . And we look up again at the cage with the rotting bones. ... At first it was free wives and free meals, and men and women ate together at public tables set in the public street. But the dispossessed Bishop, armed and accompanied by the forces of law and order, laid siege to the perverted city, and it behoved the King of Righteousness to put it in a state of defence. Boys stood beside the men on the walls and shot arrows on to the besiegers, while the women poured boiling oil on to their heads. Then famine reared its head, as famine will on these occasions. But still John of Leyden, pre- destinated, mad, drunk with power, married wives and attired them sumptuously, and lived with them and his lieutenants on the diminishing provisions of the garrison, so that the common people starved, though they, and they alone, carried on the defence of Munster. One wife, Elizabeth, history says, expostulated with the madman who ruled all, and put in a plea for the starving population, pointing out that John himself was meanwhile living in unstinted, unheard-of luxury. He struck off her head pictur- CH. XVIH] ANABAPTISTS 255 esquely with his two-handed sword, and then danced round her body with his other wives, including, I suppose, the fair Divara, who was chief among them. I think one ought to be able to make a play out of all these incidents and the strange, mad, picturesque scoundrels who had their fun and then paid the price for it. For the city was stormed and the Anabaptists put to the sword. And, seeing those low-browed stunted arches that are built in a wavering, sagging line over the flagged walk of the principal street, and which hide nearly all the daylight from the shops which are here now and were there in the old days, I could only see, as Joseph Leopold did, the awful drama for which the scene still remains set. I saw the hunted fanatics as they were chased hither and thither, in and out of their poor shelter through three days.* I saw the blood pouring, streaming, from the knees of the stone work into the gutters, and heard the shrieks, now muffled, now piercingly audible, that must have come from the hollow of the pillars as these unhappy desequilibres who had not been able to make their city of Zion a going concern paid for their politics with their lives. Oh, Munster in Westphalia is an old, hard, cruel place ! And Munster is really Germany bigoted, self-centred Germany. As for the three, John of Leyden and Knipperdoll- ing and another, there was there could be no mercy for them. Their hands were cut off, their flesh was * I don't believe the author saw anything of the sort. We were too much engaged in debating where we should eat. J. L. F. M. H. 256 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xvm torn from their bodies by red-hot pincers, they were flayed alive, and then they were hung up by the neck in the iron cages I have spoken of, and hitched up to the central tower and left to starve. They hung there, and the flesh melted off their bones, and then the bones themselves dropped slowly down to the bottom of the cage, and some of them fell through, as I have said. But there are no bones there now, I swear, although Joseph Leopold says he saw them fifteen years ago. I was cheated. We went, towards dusk, into a grim council chamber with stained-glass windows rather like the chapter-house of Durham Cathedral. There are stalls all round it and small, old, moth-eaten, velvet- embroidered cushions set on the hard seats of those stalls, and on those very velvet cushions nearly all the sommites of Europe sat once on a time when they were met in Miinster to ratify the Treaty of West- phalia and end the Thirty Years' War. The man whose name is written on a script above that seat* undoubtedly sat there, and the labels speak of Philip IV. of Spain, the Emperor Ferdinand III., and Louis XV. of France. ***** Half the population of Germany perished in that war. Nine hundred thousand men were destroyed in Saxony alone in two years. The population of one town, Augsburg, was reduced from eighty thousand to eighteen thousand, and so on, in pro- portion all over the land. What makes people do it? for people nowadays would not allow them- selves to be killed off like that for a faith, or even * Or his representative.- J. L. F. M. H. CH. xvm] ANABAPTISTS 257 for money. Was war in those days really a trade, and were the sure facilities of loot that had to be given to soldiers of fortune the inspiring cause? For there are now no Church treasuries to rob, and if there were soldiers would not be allowed to rob them. Or was it in obedience to a blind natural law, making for the reduction of populations, that nations did for themselves the work of floods and pestilence ? We went to the " Queen of England," and had the worst English restaurant dinner I have ever had, either out of England or in it, and away by the nine o'clock train, and so ended our day incognito in Miinster. CHAPTER XIX CELLE CELLE the early home of a Queen of England that was not to be, Sophia Dorothea is just such another Browning town as Hamelin. As Joseph Leopold and I drank our coffee and munched Sandkuchen over a red-checked table-cloth in front of the best and smartest inn of Celle, patronized and sealed as its respectable own by the Automobile Touring Club as we sat in the hostelry at Hamelin, with signed firmans and framed mandates of that powerful com- pany on the walls, I felt for all the world as if we were under the same dignified auspices as at Tours or Evreux in France, or Warwick or Ludlow in England. And later on, when we had penetrated farther into the smug little town of Celle and found the old, florid, out-at-elbows family hotel, with its heavy gilt cornices and fusty rep hangings, one thought of the old coaching inns at Sandwich in Kent or Alnwick in Northumberland. The differ- ence was that whereas even the distant Northum- brian inn had brought itself painfully up-to-date, with separate tables and exiguous portions served and delivered in attempted French style, the German hotel " ordinary " was still Early Victorian in 258 CH. xix] CELLE 259 amplitude and mode of cooking and serving. We all sat at one long table, with tourists, sportsmen, and commis voyageurs. And whereas in England, when replete that is to say, quite stuffed with sawdust you sally forth to visit the ill-restored cathedral, or the hopelessly ruined castle, in Germany there is nearly always a Gothic cathedral or church well left alone and in full working order, and a Schloss in as good repair as it ever was, with a roof on, and a well that can be used. And if you look for it in England there is generally a museum. But you don't look for it don't want to; you know too well what you will see there. A few vases, a few geological specimens, some section of Saurian, a model of a mine, of a ship, of a town-hall, and perhaps a Saxon altar. But in Celle, at any rate, you have not to look for the museum. It is large, new, spick and span, and planted opposite the entrance to the castle. It is a very fine museum very airy, high-pitched and light, and not nearly so tiring to go over as most museums. I think it is the dust that one imbibes that so fatigues. And where every- thing was interesting, well shown, cleverly placed, I fixed my attention on what I shall never see in England, though I have seen it in Provence, where the inhabitants of a show place are educated as they are in Germany, and take an intelligent interest in their own town, and their own pasts as citizens. For in France the Ministere des Beaux Arts, in Germany the State, in one form or another, steps in when something in the way of local his- torical evidences is disappearing, and buys it up 260 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xix puts a moral fence against vandalism round it, if it is not transplantable, or, if it is, moves it bodily to a museum. In the Arlaten Museum at Aries there is the entire reconstruction of a Provencal mas furni- ture, waxwork figures, and the rest of it. In Celle the society has done even better : there is no papier mache eidolon of the mouldering lodge of the past, but the actual farm two actual farms bought up and placed in a museum there. And there they are two peasant houses, farms of a date certainly earlier than 1640, though the model remains the same the very needy woodman's cottage, with its little light shining through the thick impenetrable forest to guide errant Princes, Huntsmen, and Clever Tailors to a shelter, planked down, lock, stock, and barrel, in the lower hall of the Celle Museum. We see three out of the four walls, like a grown-up doll's house, stained with the smoke from the big fire in the very centre of the earth floor, and the crook and the great pot slung on it. The real household utensils, shining bright, are hung on the walls, and the effigies of many hams hang from the rafters. It has been used, this room. Families have lived and died surrounded by these walls; in the inner rooms are their sleeping arrangements, shut in and curtained close, all of them, so that no air-loving Englishman could sleep in such a hot bed. The little candle of legend that flings its light on a naughty world, and calls in adventure, and sometimes mis- fortune, from the wide waste, stands against a square window on a shelf, so that it may be seen as far as possible, and at the very least tamely light the goodman home. CH. xix] CELLE 261 And to exemplify the fact that the German peasant farmer chose, and I believe does still choose, to have his ox and his ass and everything that is his or his feudal lord's within doors at night, the byre is next to the Stube, with only a door between. The patient beasts, the farmer's daylong companions of the furrow, are gathered into his peace when all their work is done. No distant defenceless stable for these good servants, and stumbling pilgrimages over the rough cobbled yard at night, by the light of an in- effectual lantern for him, roused from his slumbers by a summoning moo or whinny ! I can imagine scenes like a "Nativity" by Rembrandt the good- man sitting by his fire surrounded by his family, in the one room, among the flickering shadows, and watching, with the sleepy paternal eye of the shepherd, the oily rafters of the stable, and the dung floor that reflects no firelight rays ; listening, though he cannot see in the dim penumbra, to the patient ox nosing at the props of his stall. . . . And on Christmas Eve, when, as the legend says, these humblest servants of all are granted the gift of speech in remembrance of the Christ-Child Who once deigned to lie in their midst nor scorned them, I can fancy some Madchen or Junker aware of the wonderful miracle that may even then be passing leaving his warm place in the light, and stealing into the dim stable to listen to the beasts that speak then and then only, on that night of memories. And having lived with the Peasant awhile, we came away, and attuned ourselves to the greater, finer life of the Prince. The Schloss of Celle is just opposite the museum. In the old engravings we see 262 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xix it with a full moat and four large tourelles, with sprightly flags flying at the four corners of all of them. It is difficult to realize the defensible nature of the old building now that the flanking towers are gone, replaced by ugly, shapeless, yellow buttresses that seem to lean up against the main fabric rather than support it. The moat is filled up, occupied by peaceful shell walks and low, scrubby trees. An old man who keeps chickens is custodian, and his daughter shows you round. He is an old army officer, whose military services have been thus rewarded. That is the way they save the Govern- ment's money in Germany.* Instead of giving a pension to a retired military man, he is appointed to a nice soft place such as custodian of this kind, or he is made a railway station-master. Inside there is no sign of rack and ruin. The whole place gives the impression of cheer, ease, and comfort. It reminded me of some old, chintz- covered, lightly-papered English country - house. * It is the way they do it in England, too; or what are Hampton Court Palace and Chelsea Hospital, with their rooms and appointments for servants of the State, for ? This, in fact, is the way international comparisons get written. A German officer, A.D., gets a pension like any other officer, and although every railway official was once a soldier, that is only because every male German is, or was once, a soldier. The railway services belonging to the various States may be entered by any officer on his retirement from the army, and if, like Major W , whom our author has frequently mentioned, he be a skilful engineer, he will be employed to build new railway-lines and may become in time chief engineer of one of the great systems, which is, of course, a very good post. But the same career is open to any civilian after he has performed his two or one year's military service. J. L. F. M. H. CH. xix] CELLE 263 There is plenty of faded tapestry of a French character hung on the walls of the lower rooms and covering the sofas. In the upper ones the old paper still hangs on the walls, and it is generally a Chinese wall-paper, such as one sees in English country-houses, with pagodas and strange, long- tailed birds flying about among twisted boughs. At the very top is the theatre, a round arena built into a square apartment. The chapel is down below, and there is Caroline Matilda's pew where she sat and mourned her fall ; and the Duke of Celle's great pew where his daughter, the other discrowned Queen, must have sat and worshipped in her happier days. It was not far from here that she expiated her errors, if errors they were, and lived for thirty years as Princess of Ahlden. Sophia Dorothea's enthusiastic biographer, the late W. H. Wilkins, found his way to Ahlden on the marshes and gives a picture of it in his book. It is not very like a castle ; it is more like a court-house, which, I believe, it is or was used for. It reminds me, too, of a fortified Northumbrian manor-house or rectory such as I saw last year at Embleton and Elsdon. It is situated in an unhealthy, low-lying marsh so Mr. Wilkins told me and flat it is, for all the world like a piece of Cambridgeshire. From his description I used to make myself see a characteristic scene, inspired by my knowledge of the curious tic Sophia Dorothea had for furious driving. A long low road, stretching out over flat marsh-lands for six miles, and cross- ing a little bridge at Hayden, and over this road, in an open carriage in all weathers, a lady with black 264 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xix hair and diamonds in it, drives furiously backwards and forwards as far as the bridge, many times in the day, for thirty years. An escort of cavalry, their drawn swords flashing with another sheen than diamonds in the low light, rides always behind her. But no one, either in Hanover or Celle, seemed able to tell me anything about Ahlden, and I had to give up the idea of seeing it, except with the eyes of my head. It was only another Schloss : Germany is studded all over with them. Germany would seem to have had more potentates to the square mile than any other country. I never realized till I had lived in Germany the true incidence of the Prussian hegemony. A kingdom may occupy no more space than a good-sized pocket-handkerchief; yet it boasts a Schloss or palace in which the owner lives or not according to his fulfilment of the pact with Prussia. The Duke of Hessen-Darmstadt has a large patrimony and plenty of other places, and his palace at Giessen makes a very useful barrack. The Prince of Lippe is lord of a spring, so he has instituted a Kur. And as for architecture and appearance, palaces and Schlosses are all different. Bieberich, for instance, is like an English country-house a pale yellow mass of buildings built round a courtyard. Celle was once fortified, as I have said, but it is so no longer. . . . Hear what Caroline Matilda, the English Princess who dragged out her last weary days of banishment at Celle and prayed for resignation in the chapel there, said about the palaces she saw as she passed CH. xix] CELLE 265 through Germany on her way to take up her royal state at Copenhagen as the wife of Christian of Denmark. I found her remarks in a little French version of her Memoirs that I picked up on the quays in Paris. She was an alien, but hardly a desirable one, so her mother-in-law said. She seems to have had plenty of spirit until they broke it for her in her country of adoption, beheaded her lover, the physician, and imprisoned her, till our Ambassador, Lord Keith, insisted on taking her away. She wrote ; she read ; she had quoted Hamlet in England a propos of her intended marriage "To be, or not to be 1" i.e., " Shall I marry Christian ?" And this is what she says about the sauvagerie of her father's German relations : " Every two or three leagues," so she avers, " we seemed to pass into the territory of a different Sovereign. Sometimes I went by without even discovering that I was in the capital town of yet another Princeling. There they live, these Counts and Barons of the Holy Empire, in tumble- down castles with towers and turrets, and which they can only afford to half inhabit. They all brag of their illustrious ancestry, and when once I had seen their wretched places for myself I was able to believe their boast, since it was plain they really had lived in them from time immemorial. . . . There's more comfort and elegance to be found in the country-house of a Londoner, than in any one of these dreary abodes, hung with rotten tapestries, where some Serene Highness or other dies of ennui, though he lives in all the pomp of a monarch, with 266 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xix a suite people called cuyers, Grand Ecuyers, High Chamberlains and all unpaid. . . ." She was evidently, as the custom was, put up for the night at some of these dilapidated residences, or at any rate taken to the owners of them, for she speaks contemptuously of their women, " sitting inanimate in their own drawing-rooms like the wax figures that are kept at Westminster." And we went on to Osnabruck, where a stage of the other Hanoverian tragedy was enacted. For when Sophia Dorothea, the wife of our first George, lay on her deathbed in the castle of Ahlden, she raved, she denounced her husband, the King of England, and she wrote or dictated, so the story says, a letter to be delivered to him, after her death. And the same story says that it was de- livered nine months afterwards to the King when he landed on his biennial visit to his other less important but more darling kingdom of Hanover. The receipt of it brought on the apoplectic stroke that he did not recover from. Moaning and crying out, the red, puffy, unwholesome little old man put his head out of the carriage window and passion- ately urged the postilions forward. " Osnabruck ! Osnabriick !" he mumbled, as his faculties became more and more bemused. His brother was Bishop of Osnabruck, and he wanted to die in the palace there. He knew he must die ; a fortune-teller had assured him long ago in England that his wife's death would only too surely herald his own. It is hinted that Sophia Dorothea's own span might have been shorter, and her existence made less tolerable, if this superstitious idea had not taken solid root in CH. xix] CELLE 267 the mind of George. He was a mass of supersti- tions, and his spirit kept its word and visited the Duchess of Kendal i.e., Kielsmansegge, the lady whose yellow cloak Sophia Dorothea had mocked after death. She was used to swear that into the window of her room at Richmond a white dove flew, and that it was the ghost of her royal lover. The shabbiness, the vapidness, as of an old, bat- tered, tattered, two-shilling, yellow-back novel, of Osnabruck struck me to the soul. And yet we stayed in it, in a mouldering hotel, very big, very vast, with enormous rooms opening through tall oppressive folding-doors into other enormous rooms ; we slept in little, cheap iron bedsteads that sneaked in the corners, leaving vast unoccupied spaces of moth-eaten carpet where a bed with a baldaquin and tester should have reared its proud head. I was very glad it didn't, though ! It was impossible to eat in the hotel. There were only two restaurants in Osnabruck, and they were no better qua food than the hotel, only the table linen was clean and mended. It was a city of desolation to me, but yet it was a handsome city. It had parks and walks laid out on the ramparts, and two churches and a Bishop's palace the palace that George tried to attain to, but did not. There was nothing to do there ; there was not even a cinematograph. One night we went to a smoking concert in a Biergarten and heard miners sing through a long, interminable programme. And yet they sang very well. In the afternoons we walked along one of the three straight allees laid out on the ramparts and stared at the queer, reticent old Bishop's palace on the other side. 268 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xix One of these three allees had a board up bearing the words : " Only for Old Ladies " ; another was " Verboten to Old Ladies " ; the third was reserved for Cavaliers.* There was probably some reason for this, but I never discovered what it was, or in which allee I was to walk. Supposing I, as an old lady, wished to visit a cousin at the end of the park in company with Joseph Leopold ; supposing I needed the support of his stalwart arm ? It could not be done. I should have to walk in the allee that was only for old ladies ; he, in that forbidden to my kind, and the whole allee reserved for cavaliers would be between us ! * I do not believe that these notice-boards ever existed. Our author was probably hypnotized into seeing them by the English belief that such things exist in Germany. Of course many notice- boards exist in that fertile and regulated land. In almost every public place you will read on one seat the words : " Only for children," and on the next : " Forbidden to children." Perhaps once in Brunswick City there was an Obertribunal procurator, whose children put out their tongues at an infirm but disagree able Lady-in- Waiting to the Serenity. Such things happen. Then, to avoid scandal between these important functionaries, to avoid Court intrigues, the fall of Ministries and possible revolutions, the benevolent Prince would order that children and old ladies should be separated and very sensibly, too. J. L. F. M. H. CHAPTER XX TRIER WE had been in four countries that day, I thought, with a shiver of globe-trotting pride, as I turned in that night. From a bed in Paris it was that I had arisen that morning. In the course of the day we had passed through Belgium, looked in at the Grand-duchy of Luxembourg, and, misliking it, had packed into the train again and come across the frontier back into Germany. We could truly say, that morning when we paid our bill in Paris, we were all unwitting that we should sleep in Germany. That was the fun of it. Our country drew us unknowingly to its bosom. Luxembourg was a fraud. Joseph Leopold had always had a weakness for Luxembourg. It is small and independent ; a buffer State between two great antagonistic Powers ; a capital that has never been taken. For that it has to thank its impreg- nable position. It has a coinage, a set of postage- stamps, quite nice and suitable little laws. Nobody ever seems to be naughty there, and nobody makes trouble ; nobody is looking for it. And so we went to Luxembourg. We got out of the train about one o'clock, and, says Joseph 269 270 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xx Leopold, picturesquely recounting the tale of our brief descent upon the city, I gave one wild scream and desired to brush its mud from off my boots at once. I did not scream. I sniffed and said that Luxembourg was to me like a place in a dream, an ugly dream of suburbia. That was all I said then, and although I have been driven to mention the particular district of suburban London of which Luxembourg reminds me, I will not do so again, because a distinguished novelist of my acquaintance lives there, and has protested. We spent in this truly blessed town two hours, and in that short space I realized what the perfect State, as designed by a Radical House of Commons, and which, by means of Insurance Bills and other forms of grandmotherly legislation they are now hoping to inaugurate in good old naughty England, would be like. It is also the poet Wordsworth's personal ideal multiplied by numbers : "To sit without ambition, hope, or aim, And listen to the flapping of the flame And kettle singing its faint undersong." And one pictures the inhabitants of this dignified city, socially a cut above Wordsworth and the cottage at Rydal, sitting behind stucco-marbled pilasters, in gardens full of pot-shrubs, listening to the sudden jar of the embers in the heated stoves, eating in- digestible cakes, and meditating their reasonable alliances, their gentle business bargains, their seasonable deaths, or simply thinking of nothing at all. This may not be so I do not state it as a fact for one moment. I was in no private house of CH. xx] TRIER Luxembourg, except a mild cafe, a quiet post-office, a respectable church. But I seemed to feel this sort of thing going on in the white plastered houses ensconced in gardens full of shrubs, behind reticu- lated stuccoed balustrades, like A Road, or, let us say, Palace Gardens both streets where even art nouveau has not penetrated. It may not be, but I think that no Luxembourgeois would be capable of crime splendid crime, at least. History only records one crime, and that is a mean one. The Bastard of Luxembourg sold Joan of Arc to the English for a few hundred crowns. The reason Luxembourg has never been taken is its position, coupled with its want of importance. The town is situated on a vast rambling series of hills surrounded by a sort of wide natural moat approached by long bridges built over the valley from all sides. Two rivers flowing right through would connect it, in case of a siege, with the material resources of the outer world. But as yet war has not menaced Luxembourg. The florid gardens of the citizens, with their stucco bastions, hang over the embattled steep, and the noise of gracefully dripping fountains fills the air. . . . We bought some stamps and some postcards, changed some money and got some Luxembourg coins in exchange. These we took as curiosities. (Specimens of them lurk in my purse to this day, wherewith I affront peaceable citizens in England, France, and Germany.) And then we took the train for a town in Germany, Treves or Trier, as I am bound to call it. Trier is more or less a frontier town. There is 272 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xx that feeling about it all the time. One seems to hear the uncertain twittering of embarrassed peoples, living on the edge of one civilization where it merges into another. The want of character of the duchy is in dreary juxtaposition to the cranky national idiosyncrasies of a borderland of German people. We got in about eleven o'clock at night. We consumed, naturally, the unfailing Wiener-Schnitzel (generally a safe draw in Germany) at the station, and then walked along into the town, in search of an hotel indicated by the waiter. It was a very dark and dull night. The sight of Trier to a woman who has never seen Rome and never hopes to do so I do not, be it observed, say hopes never to do so is something stupendous. And Joseph Leopold, who has seen Rome had just come from thence, in fact when we entered Trier by the Porta Nigra was very nearly as deeply impressed as I. We walked from the station. The streets were dark, lighted only by the average city illumination, as we approached a slight ditch, answering to the raising of the soil's level in the course of two thousand years, and in that ditch we saw a mass of crumbling masonry, huge, portentously old, cruel and jagged-looking. That was all. On our left was the great modern hotel, " The Porta Nigra," outfacing the town lights with the glare of its restaurant, and here was its ancient namesake, the great gate of the old Roman town of Trier, dull, lonely, unlighted. Two tram - lines, dipping into the shallow ditch, passed round it, like an ambulant girdle of light, and then coalesced. CH. xx] TRIER 273 The gate is for all the world like the fitoile, or the Marble Arch. But it is not riante, or commonplace like those two ; it is grim and sardonic, hopeless and left behind, majestic in its indifference. It has none of the well-to-do spruceness of a gate in which a concierge lives. The citizens do well not to light it ; they merely allow it to be girt round with the rattling, glaring evidence of civilization. I had never seen anything like it. By daylight it is hardly less portentous, though the stone looks greyer, more powdery, and patched in places. It reminded me of an old hollow tooth, or of another ruin of equal caducity of aspect that is, the very oldest tree at Burnham Beeches. And it is quite hollow, like those majestic wrecks. The custodian's room, built in modern medieval times by some dead and gone Bishop, has fallen also to decay; the arched galleries where the Roman soldiers walked and sighted arrivals, the conning-towers whence they flashed their wireless messages, are less frittered and crumbled than those trees. But, as the child said of the elephant, it looks so big it can't all of it die. There is no reason why these swart ungainly lumps of stone, laid together and cemented with the faultless Roman mortar, should ever disintegrate. It is not a flimsy structure like St. Paul's in London, which the loaded trams, the underground tubes can sha':e into disruption. I saw once, in childhood, a picture of the Porta Nigra in my German history book, and I recognized the original with a positive flash of gladness. But the little cut over Mrs. Markham's twelfth chapter 18 274 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xx does not give the massive solidity of the heap of stones that came to stay, and has stayed, and will stay. Trier was Roman, and is Roman still. I felt it there keenly the continuity of races, and the basic value of Rome just as I do in France at Carcassonne, in England at Old Sarum, and in every place where Rome has been, has washed in, pushing its irre- sistible tide of conquest. One realizes the patient, stolid, plodding staying-power which makes Rome seem so young and vital everywhere but in Rome. There, I am told, the sense of solidity and endur- ance have cracked and been burnt out with the scarifying heat and sun of centuries. Anyhow, one never gets away from Rome anywhere else. Why should one ? Rome is very recent, viewed with that strong sense of continuity of time which is mine. The first day I was in Trier I took a walk up the hills on the Luxembourg side. I saw the monu- ment of Ygel, so like the monument at St. Remy. I passed the Marien Saule, a figure of the Virgin, with her crown, composed of stars, lit up at night by the town electric works, and placed on a Roman altar to some General or other. I looked on the glancing white, low-roofed houses of the plain, the delicate, deliberate slope of the arched bridges that spanned the Mosel ; I noticed the ferry, the large, black caulked boat, worked by pulleys and levers on the Roman system. Then my eyes harked back to pick out the Roman buildings, the palace of the Caesars, the Basilica, the Porta Nigra, isolated by its ring of tram-lines, and the faint tracings of the CH. xx] TRIER 275 foundations of the Baths. The Arena is hidden behind a low hill with trees. There is all Rome, its royalty, its religion, its health, its amusements. The Basilica is complete and as ugly as it ever was. The small portion of the ruined palace of Constantine seems as important as the whole of any ordinary restored medieval castle ; it makes up in massive- ness and weight for what it has lost in wall space. It is an empty shell granted but the shell of a roc's egg, or, to use another zoological comparison, the rotundities broadening at the base of its four bastions, like an elephant's feet, seem planted firmly on the soil for ever. Yes, seen from the Marienhohe, Trier must have looked, those few poor hundred years ago, when Constantine, fighting at Neumagen, made his splendid speech, much as it looks to-day. And with characteristic German thoroughness, the worthy dispassionate guide-books take pains to acquaint one with all the etapes of wilful neglect which the vestiges suffered at the hands of the two wanton centuries that preceded our two. This gener- ation is so proud of them ! The Baths, now they are excavated, are laid out, the different levels accounted for, and the foundations, where not even foundations exist, carefully made, put in the plans sold by the polite custodian. But of the Baths themselves there is nothing left but a few props of the hypocausts, pillars, and an uneven, broken-up floor or so. It re- minds one very much of the basement of a large Lon- don house after the house-breakers have done their worst. Still, in innocent self-damnation, there are given, at the back of the plan, views of the buildings 276 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [eft. xx as they existed two centuries ago. " Siidfacade bis zum Jahre, 1610," and again, " Innen Aussicht, 1610." Both cuts show fine upstanding groups of masonry, rising to one story in most cases, some- times to two, portals, arches, all crumbling, but a building still, not a basement. So it is obvious that up to 1610 holes might have been stopped, lead roofs put on, necessary reparations made, a little of the civic money spent, whose sum would gladly be doubled, tripled by the antiquarian societies of to- day. Best of all, the general process of " lifting," winked at all over the world, might have been pre- vented, instead of being encouraged. Then the stones of Trier, of Carcassonne, of Borcovicus on the Roman wall, would not have been filched. Now- adays, they " stop a hole, t'expel the winter's flaw " in the cottage of some yokel, leaning slavishly against some of the grandest bits of masonry in the world. Whole villages would not have grown up, like toadstools in a forest of arching trees, built of stones prigged, without manorial or seigneurial re- proach, from the patient unconsidered ruin near by. But nobody knew or cared anything about anti- quities in those two dreadful centuries. Read Giovanni Casanova, who did his courting of the Roman girls " dans quelques vieilles ruines tom- bantes" great chunks of villa and gate and circus, extant then and standable on, that have simply disap- peared to-day ! In those days Nature alone was worshipped and not even Nature very much on the Continent. In England a few protests were made by local anti- quaries dry-as-dust inhuman people like Surtees CH. xx] TRIER 277 and Raine but Strawberry Hill Gothic was not condemned, and Walter Scott collogued with these Vandals in disguise and built Abbotsford. The arena at Trier has in the nature of things not suffered so deeply as the baths. There was less to carry off, only a circle of stone seats and a couple of chariot entrances, for most of the business was conducted below. The great circle has been excavated it is all lightly grass-grown the three tiers of seats, the two entrances, and a half-dozen or so of bins at the sides for the wild beasts, which the eager crowds looked at and poked up while they waited for the real fun to begin, and the victims brought up by the lift to the trap-door and planked down ready for the carnage. The zealous Ger- man antiquaries have excavated below. We went down, led by our old soldier of a guide, into a ghastly pit of shining mud and glassy pools of water, holding in solution all that is left of the original floor of the basement. And in recondite caverns leading off from the main underground parterre, the victims were penned. Here was the lift that brought them, dazed and brutalized, up to the light of day and death. The mouldering joists of the lift machinery are still here : the Roman had every convenience that an inventive, a cool and calculating mind could suggest. ***** It is one of the insane peculiarities of the tempes- tuous, restless, German nature of Joseph Leopold that he is incapable of spending what is called a quiet evening at home. He must be out, and he must drag his womankind out with him too. When 2 ;8 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xx we are staying in hotels there is some justifiable excuse for this course, at all events in German hotels ; for in these there is no drawing-room in its primary sense of withdrawing room. When you have dined or supped, you a Dame, or even a Frau have nowhere to retire to except your bedroom or the Schreibzimmer. Now, the exceedingly unso- ciable and grotesque arrangement and appointments of the Schreibzimmer would lead one to suppose that every German's correspondence is of a dark and secret nature, for one is expected to sit severally in a sort of cubicle or bin, and the traitorous move- ments of one's pen are hidden by a series of glass shields erected between the writer and the tenant of the next compartment. " There is always the smoking-room," I hear someone exclaim. I know that my sex frequently does penetrate to this desecrated male holy of holies, but that is in the larger hotels, where there is, of course, a drawing-room as well as a lounge, and it is pure feminine perversity which suggests a raid on exclusively male quarters. But the adven- turous female who wishes to follow her husband and share his after-dinner cigarette with him must make up her mind to reverse the proceeding and follow her Orpheus into a milder sort of hell, rank with tobacco fumes ; its rough wooden tables littered with Schoppen and pools of spilt beer ; a region whose reigning Pluto does not want Eurydice at any price. It is never done. I once saw two high- bred English ladies peering disconsolately into the extremely Teniers-like interior of the Weinstube of a certain hotel at Trier, looking earnestly for the CH. xx] TRIER 279 usual stuffy apartment with dull stained -glass windows giving on to the mews, but glorious within in the style of Liberty, set with palms whose genesis is wrapped in scarves, and dotted with tables bearing travellers' Bibles and hotel advertise- ments, and pens that won't write. "What? No drawing-room?" they cried, and flounced out. So after dinner I put a Schleier over my head, and we go out into the square front of the Hotel zur Post and turn a corner and find ourselves in one of the little narrow, stone-paved streets of which the old town of Trier is composed. The gables of the houses seem, in the dimness, to peer down on us and brush our shoulders. Ten to one, after we have been walking for five minutes or two, we meet the ambulant police officer with his quiet, sullen- looking dog. He peeps, gently, and with no great effect of excessive vigilance, down this or that dark valley, into dusky entries ; he examines tall porte cocheres where dusky forms wait and linger. The German streets are the constant scene of crime and violence. Yet, though people are nervous, they are so distrustful of the police that they subscribe to Watchman Societies in the hopes of sleeping sound o' nights. As a matter of fact, the German police are dishonest and untrustworthy. The post of policeman is the usual appanage of a non-com- missioned officer, and he is no good. Having no traditions, no point of honour, he is utterly unfitted for the responsible post of guardian of the liberty of the subjects of the Kaiser. My Aunt Emma, in her lonely villa at B , 280 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xx resembling a villa at Surbiton or Laleham, has like- wise no great opinion of her national police. So, although she subscribes with her neighbours to employ a private constable to watch her door at night, she prefers to make assurance doubly sure, and sets a thief to catch a thief, as it were. A clever mechanical contrivance in the nature of a clock is attached to her front door. The trusty watchman, passing to and fro on his beat every ten minutes, is bound to punch the clock every time, and the incorruptible instrument registers the punch. So much for Aunt Emma, who is very old and very wise, for so far her watchman, his morals reinforced by this clock, has never failed her. We go on through a maze of little quiet streets of houses interspersed by high mute-faced garden walls, enclosing churchyards, some of them, for the long yew boughs lean over into the roadway. As we wander, for half an hour together all is dark, mysterious, and silent, until the city tram, like a huge perambulating nightbeetle, all iridescent and phosphorescent in the gloom, comes blundering through, tickling the shutters of the houses, and flattening us against the wall till it has passed. And presently, in pursuance of Joseph Leopold's nightly policy, we pass through the lighted portals of one of three homes of light and song that Trier holds. There is no play on at the theatre that night, and no concert at the Club next door. Only last night we took our tickets a couple of hours before- hand, and returned at seven seven, mind you ! to see " Der Condottiere." It was the history of a certain Colleone who for love of a lady betrayed CH. xx] TRIER 281 Venice. One lady nay, two, even three all of them were ready to risk life and honour for the sake of Colleone, who was quite old and not ashamed of it. This was one of the touches of realism in an otherwise romantic play ; everyone comes and tells Colleone that he is gaga, and ought to know better, but he naturally falls back on his demonstrable fascinations ; so lovely Venetian ladies continue to be admitted at all hours. In between the acts we wandered about in a large foyer, very white and clean, hung with portraits of great actors, and drank bocks and coffee served from a buffet by two lovely Madchen not a bit like bar- maids. Then we went in to see Colleone die impressively in his chair before the Doge's throne, stripped of his honours, and condemned to death. At least, this is how I made out the Byronic story. But as I say, there was no play on that night at all, and no concert. For weeks we had seen across the square from our hotel a dreary civic building of sorts which had borne in white letters the announce- ment " Tuberculosis Museum," and I had promised myself that one hour at least I would sup full of horrors. But this evening the label had gone, and the plain grey building became what it always was the Cadastral offices of Trier. And so we fell back on the plat dujour a cinematograph. I had never seen a cinematograph show until I came to live in Germany. I was then told that England abounded in them, and that this wild joy was at hand, and had been at hand for years in the two main streets that bounded my dwelling. I had never, so far, discovered them never known this 282 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xx famous form of amusement. Now I live in them. I am only sorry that the censor has lately been allowed to have anything to do with them ; for now I shall never see again what I saw in the course of my first cinematograph the . . . No ! Joseph Leopold, taking upon himself the office of the much-abused functionary, says that I am not to set down what I saw. At any rate, it was the triumph of the unexpected, and that surely is the salt of cinemato- graphs and entertainments generally. And it was nothing wrong it was only out of place, and would not have been out of place in a musical comedy nay, it would have been indicated. ... I burn to say what it was. . . . Joseph Leopold does not take a frivolous view of this enormous international development. The cinematograph is an institution ; it is educational ; it is, at any rate, reading without tears.* It is vastly inducive of a philosophical attitude of mind ; it is a vivid, cogent object-lesson in the sequence of events. The couple of stories usually given historical, cosmopolitan, revelatory of varieties of national character, as even the more laughable films are must be provocative of something like the prophetic powers that a study of history, past and present, gives. A Hoch Spannendes Detective Drama may, in its details, pander to a vulgar taste, but it is pretty certain to reach the level of the intelligence it is designed to impress. Possibly some forger has * The village of Kreuzberg on April 14, 1913, allocated ^50 of its yearly revenue to purchasing seats for poor children at the local cinematographs on Sundays throughout the year. J. L. F. M. H. CH. xx] TRIER 283 been turned from his wickedness, some fool from his folly, some potential murderer from his crime, by the sight of one of these dramas of financial ruin, of blood and revenge, even though, owing to the obvious imperfection of the medium, blood cannot run red or the face of the ruined man blanch. It is better so ; it is better, as Shakespeare's Helena said, that " the white death should sit on their cheeks for ever," for the coloured films are abominable. But as it is, I should not mind wagering that conscience money has been paid as a result of some evening spent in a red plush-covered armchair, with an anti- macassar slung over the back of it a square of tawdry lace that is apt to follow you out into the street. And are no simple souls induced to a more tolerant rule of piety after seeing, say, "The Bellringer," where the devil terrifies the ancient functionary from ringing the Angelus, and only gives him leave to pursue his calling on condition that the devil shall take the first soul that enters the church while the bell is ringing ? It is hard on the soul, but the philosophy of the scapegoat is sound enough. The innocent, since medieval times, must suffer for the guilty. And an angel from Heaven, her wide wings disguised under a beggar's cloak, enters the church, and rings the bell for the charitable old bellringer, who has stooped in the porch to succour her. This is, of course, a film which would not obtain in a Protestant town. And others which I have seen in Germany would be prohibited in England for the sake of the young person. People rail in England against this large-looming 284 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xx personage, and her invasion of the library com- mittees and the stalls at the " problem " plays, so dear to the English soul. But we have a short way with her in Germany. English people, who have a reasonable zest for seeing life as it is, complain that they are driven by their parental susceptibilities to read milk-and-water stuff, and view plays that are only fit for babes. But no one suggests that the onus of chaperonage might be thrown on the police, as it is in Germany, and the young person, deaf to moral suasion of parents, kept by armed force from the book or the play, instead of the play or the book from the young person ! Yet it is practically so in Germany as far as the theatre is concerned. Reasonable plays are put on and enjoyed by the elders. An angel with a flaming sword stands at the gate of the theatrical Eden and forbids the young of both sexes to enter Paradise before their time i.e., eighteen years old. The Chief of Police pre- scribes to what plays young men and maidens under this age shall be admitted or no, and places a simple policeman at the doors of the theatre to enforce his behest. And as for children of tender years, the Germans see that the lesson shall not be too strong, too deeply driven home to the tender intelligence. When a film that may prove a bugbear is presented, or one holding the powers-that-be up to execration or vilifying the Army, and any other lawfully con- stituted authority, children are not allowed to enter at all. It is impossible for local governments to take such a tender interest in the morals of their subjects CH. xx] TRIER 285 without the conflict of authorities producing some odd results. It must never be forgotten that Germany is a mass of little, ill-welded nationalities, all under a First War Lord. That is what the Kaiser literally is. The curious local jealousies existing between one State and another are the unknown factor, and make a topsy-turveyness which in operation remind one of an opera of Gilbert and Sullivan. There is one famous film, " Heisses Blut," which was prohibited in Frankfort and forbidden to be performed in Trier. That is why I was able to see it in H , because H is in Hessen-Darmstadt, not in Prussia. And it is really, as its name denotes, a " Spannendes Drama." A beautiful and famous Danish actress has played in the preparation of the film the part of the woman of strong passions united to a gentleman unable to satisfy them. She casts her affection on the new chauffeur, and makes an assignation with him during her husband's absence. He returns and surprises the pair, and turns the temperamental lady and her lover out of the house. The degraded one becomes a burglar's mate, and we see her in a thieves' kitchen concocting a plan for the breaking into her former abode. She is persuaded by her truculent chauffeur lover to dress as a boy, to scale the window and let him in. She naturally chooses the nursery window. By her boy's cot the ex-husband finds her ; she con- fesses, and he takes her back. Hoch Spannendes, indeed ! For novelists like Joseph Leopold and me the rage for picture theatres is a distinct gain. It may be 286 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xx the novel-form of the future. When there will be so many books published that no one has time to read them, the author, wise before his time, will devote his intelligence to the presentation of his message, whatever it is, through this hasty medium, to all who will not wait for the development of style, niceties of dialogue, and so on. It is not perhaps generally known that the actors who take the parts of characters in a film accompany all their gestures, for the sake of vraisemblance, with speeches appro- priate thereto half gag, half set down for them. But without envisaging such a total abnegation of the merits of style in the future, let us see that in so far as the present condition of things affects authors they have all to gain by the tales that are told nightly in dumb show. The audience, composed pretty nearly of rustics in the classical sense, un- sophisticated, unlettered, slow at apprehending the contortions, the mysteries of a good plot, will gradually get more and more used to following its peripatetics, tracing out its issues, holding the multiple strands that go to make a story, weaving them gradually, skilfully, into the main one, till by the time the light suddenly grows in the " Saal," and the Pathe cock seems to stand on the empty sheet and crow triumphant, the whole has grown coherent in their minds. It is magnificent training for readers. We see in " Das Gefahrliche Alter," another good German film, the spendthrift at the restaurant confronted by la douloureuse, and the elegant harpy who has cost him so dear at his side egging him on : " Get the money to pay it I" Her speech is given in writing on a board, but it is CH. xx] TRIER 287 hardly necessary the context is explanatory enough. The slide shifts, we see his mother weeping over her secretaire, where notes for fifty pounds are tumbling about, mixed with correspondence cards, as they will in the desks of mothers in films. We see her go to bed. And in the next slide her son appears, walking in the peering, creepy way which is sug- gestive of proposed criminal attempts on secretaires. . . . And so on and so on, to a mother's inevitable forgiveness. Yes, I consider the advent of the Boy Scouts, the invention of picture postcards, and the rage for picture theatres, as the three most important de- velopments of this age of brass and iron. ***** I began this book with a procession ; 1 will begin to end it with one. The stateliness of a King of England's coronation, its proud aloofness, has no parallel in this lively, bourgeois city of Trier, where incapable policemen are jostled by the crowds they marshal, and even the imperious military are not taken seriously on a day of feasting. And I re- membered that orderly and well-dragooned crowd in front of Parliament Square on June 22, 1911, when the police had carefully winnowed and mown the street of possible suffragettes, and incidentally of all the people who had come to see other people. But here in Trier I was glad enough of Joseph Leopold's tidy German circumference as we pushed our way through the narrow streets in the thickest, the bluffest crowd I ever found myself in. The occasion was the hundredth Jahrfeier of the Kaiserin Augusta " verbunden mit Kornblumentag 288 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xx in Trier." A deeply, nationally beloved Queen she was. Her picture in the programme shows her a quiet, determined, sage lady, her head wrapped in a Schleier becoming her age. The Kornblume is her flower blue is the Prussian colour and the loyal inhabitants of Trier were glad to link up a His- torische Festzug with her day, and promote a festival of the nature of one of the Pageants they arrange so often in England nowadays to stir up the dormant histrionic and spectacular talent of the old maids of provincial towns. The programme began at seven, with Military Wecken. From eight o'clock onwards, Helfende Damen sold favours in the streets, Kornblumen ; picture postcards and programmes. Hastily, of the first Helfende Dame who came along smiling, with a basketful of the small blue cornflowers, Joseph Leopold purchased a couple or so of blooms, and stuck them about us both. He was right, for we were besieged by more beautiful ladies, each clamouring, like any enterprising fish-wife, for us to buy her particular wares. The sight of the Kornblumen pinned on our coats, purchased of a colleague, stilled and daunted the others some- what, and we were allowed to pass along to the places we had secured. Kornblumen, for months afterwards, surged into my ken, from wardrobes and letter-cases and trunks we had been obliged in the end to buy dozens of these tickets-of- leave. We got at last to the stand, erected in the old market-place, with the two great churches on the one side and the old house of Councillor K , CH. xx] TRIER 289 with its hot, sulphurous-looking painted gables, on the other. The procession began with the usual heralds, a sort of plain bread-and-butter course before the cake and jam of the important entries. After the Vorgruppe, came a very telling, and to German eyes pleasant, scene of Germans, after a successful fight leading home the captive Romans in chains, and ox- carts laden with spoil. That is how 'twas. Even my Mrs. Markham says so. The German warriors were a hairy set of people covered with skins and gold bangles, and wearing helmets crowned with the horns of every known beast. A personage, called on the programme Hermann der Cherusker- furst, followed them. Mrs. Markham had not en- lightened me as to him, and I puzzled in vain to discover if Cherusker wasn't a German way of spelling Merovingian. You see I had a better- drawn literary picture in my mind Carlyle's of the " Merovingian Kings wending slowly on their bullock-carts through the streets of Paris with their long hair flowing. . . ." Carlyle's few words have for ever made me see the great eyes of Clovis and Merovee full of the unassuaged wild melancholy and savagery of primitive conquerors and rulers. I look at their presentations in frescoes and statues, and imagine them saying always, " A quoi bon ?" And these travestied actors and apprentices and shopmen of Trier, as I suppose they were, posing as Neustrians and Austrasians, clad temporarily in such impossible, unspeakable garb, easily suggested by their gloom and gaucherie and " wish I were at home " air the necessary touch of verisimilitude. Then " mit 19 290 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xx seinem Gefolge " came the greatest man Europe has ever been privileged to see, according 1 to Joseph Leopold, Kaiser Karl der Grosse. The German who impersonated Charlemagne seemed a little weighted by his importance. I think he was an actor. He had an Abteilung all to himself. He was followed by an overbalanced section compris- ing Barbarossa, looking very shy in his immense red wig, and Henry the Lion, with knights and standard-bearers galore. The next part, without an interval, struck me, in my limited Mrs. Markham-bounded knowledge of German history, as a tremendous leap across the centuries to the Thirty Years' War. There was an end of impersonators cluttered up with wigs and skins and bangles ; instead, we had dignified gentle- men in coats and cocked hats and gold lace, Generalissimus Field - Marshal Wallenstein and Piccolomini. And I thought of the pathetic plaint of Thekla : " Du Heilige, rufe dein Kind zuriick ' Ich habe genossen das Irdische Gluck Ich habe gelebt und geliebet.' " But everybody has not ploughed through " The Piccolomini " and read the tale of Wallenstein's defaulting General and his daughter's fate not Joseph Leopold, for instance, who gazed unswayed by sentiment on the long procession of the real victims of Tilly and Wallenstein i.e., the Lands- knechte and Bauern, samples of the hapless peoples whose homesteads were sacked and burned, whose fields were the marching grounds for thirty years of the armies of these selfish contending dynasties. CH. xx] TRIER 291 The fifth part dealt with the time of the great Kurfiirsten and Frederick William and his big grenadiers ; and the sixth part, which took as long again as any of the others to unroll, with Frederick the Great and his Generals, Ziethen, Schwerin, and the romantic figure of the Old Dessauer. Most people have a weakness for the Old Dessauer because of his mad passion for Anna-Lise, the apothecary's daughter. It was not at first admitted by his family, but once when he came back from some campaign or other to be covered with honours, the young impulsive fellow was not to be found to receive them. " Where is he ?" cry Court Chamber- lains, Gold-sticks-in-Waiting, pages, and all. At last some unconsidered menial hazards the suggestion, " Er ist bei dem Apotheker !" And sure enough Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau, placing his sweetheart before all honours and claims of family, had run straight to her, and there was nothing to be done but give him his wish and marry him to the apothecary's daughter. It goes on, the tramp of soldiers' feet, the Trom- meln and Pfeifenchor, the Freiheitskampfer, the Lutzower Freihusaren, and Schiedhusaren, and end- less military figures on horseback with names that stir one Theodor KOrner, Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, Von Horn, and General Field-Marshal Blucher ; and then the Einigungskriegen, and its authors General- feldmarschall von Moltke, Kriegsminister von Roon, and Fiirst Bismarck ! This is German history. And where was William the First ? The great dignified figures sitting negligently on 292 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xx horseback with serious faces, the gold galloons showing under their cloaks, passed, and gave way to a parade of modern weapons and uniforms a coarse show of warlike strength, almost paralyzing in its suggestion of completeness. And following, Spielleute, Infanterie, Jager and Schutzen, Masch- inen Gewehr complett, Pioniere, Fussartillerie, Feldartillerie, and Kavallerie, and last but not least, after Die Rothe Kreuz Sanitats Truppe, came the saddest post -reflection on all these splendours Unsere Veteranen ! Old, worn, battered, like wind-tossed, rain-faded scarecrows, the men of 1870 paraded their honour- able caducity along the sunshiny, wind-swept street. In rows of four they tottered along. Some could walk, and some could only drive. In carriagefuls of four these drove slowly by. They did not look happy or prosperous. Dazed they seemed, half puzzled, half annoyed by the light, these ghosts of a warlike past dragged away from their chimney corners where they are permitted to dream away in penurious decency the rest of a life whose youth was devoted to the Kaiser. They have lived through it, just. One could hardly picture them as they were then, bold, strong, erect, and kind. Yes, they were kind : France owns it. Of all the procession of mummers these were the real thing the grey, morne reality of war. The rest was " fake," but this was silence. CHAPTER XXI "TAKE US THE LITTLE FOXES" IN those last days of September, nineteen hundred and eleven, there breathed over all South Germany a spirit of breathless calm such a calm, says Euripides, as preceded the advent of the supreme beauty and good of Helen. The promise of the vivid and portentous summer was about to be fulfilled, and over this land where for ever the words seem to whisper, " Take us the little foxes, the little foxes that eat the grapes !" the Spirit of the vine brooded over her nurslings as they were being brought to pure perfection in the deep peace of seasonable days. And only a year before the Rhinelanders were in mourning. The aspect of Germany's divinest product was pitiable indeed, even to the eyes of a comparative outsider. The little, mysterious plants on which so much depended were still stiffly up- standing, showed no weakness, though they were drenched with rains, harried by cold gusts, con- sumed to the heart by mildew. Yet all the while the pernicious damp was eroding the leaves and rotting the grapes in the bunch. The fruit was not worth gathering, and nobody gathered it, but passed the vines, moribund in their thousands, with more 293 294 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxi or less averted gaze. The whole vine-crop was ruined. But in this year, that I was permitted to see fulfil its promise, it was not so. The outrageous summer of which we had all complained, that was Europe's poison, was at least the South German's meat, and the autumn weather, during the fateful three weeks that precede the accomplishment of the vintage, deigned to be propitious for the health of these nacreous balls of green jelly, whose force and sweetness is bound to make the world's stored gaiety for the next ten years and more. That vintage was a record vintage, and bottled joy, with- out a headache in a hogshead, bearing on its cork faces the impressive four figures, will for a full decade be sought after and prized. It was the hottest summer since fourteen hundred and fifty-three. The summer bred no rotting, root- destroying rains ; only towards autumn came such beneficent natural mists as do not pierce and suck into the soul of the grape, but merely bathe the skins gently, considerately, in a soothing and stimulating moisture. Soft skies and cloudless hung over the vine-hills, and over an utterly happy people going about the businesses that occupy them for forty-nine weeks of the year, but stealing now and then a posses- sive glance at the parterre of vines that marches with the road they are travelling, or gazing up, craning their necks at the precipitous crags where perhaps their own vines hang. They are thinking of that time, so near, when from grey dawns, through broad days, and into the very heart of dim moonlights, breathlessly the harvest of their hopes will be CH. xxi] "TAKE US THE LITTLE FOXES" 295 gathered. The eye of their thought sees the stems stripped, the grapes squeezed and pressed, weighed, tested, and paid for, squeezed again, and sent through pipes into the barrels of the cellars below. There the last long stage, ere the juices reach their throats and ours is consummated in an absolute and secret darkness. In Italy, I suppose for I have never been there all at this season is colour and excitement, flam- boyant faldetti, gorgeous purple winepresses and barefoot, faun-like peasants dancing down the foam- ing must to the twanging of the zither and the bagpipe. In France* the wildest passions have sway, they tell me, pleasure turned to pain and riot, and the free blood of the vine spilt in the furrow, in the streets even, not in love, but in hate. But here, on the broad Rhine, on the Mosel and the Saar, broad streams too here in my adopted country, as far as I can see, reigns the true Pax Germanica no noise, no sound of quarrelling, but an almost Sabbatical hush as the yearned-for time draws near. It is all temperate, concentrated anticipation. In the little vine villages I noticed, many a day before the pick- ing, the smart red and green winepresses piled in joiners' shops, stacked at the corners of streets, being washed clean in the dun gloom of outhouses in readiness for the day of days. On that day they * This is a suggestio falsi. The French winegrower is a vastly less jovial man than the German. He is also immeasurably more scientific in his methods, both of growing and of picking. If he rioted the other day it was because of the bitter seriousness with which he takes his profession, and wine ran in the streets mixed with a little blood. The Germans would have drunk it all up. J. L. F. M. H. 296 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxi will be placed in carts, and the carts will be driven away to stand somewhere as near the field of labour as the oxen can drag them up the steep and slaty roads, and all the pairs of hands will be com- mandeered to work, while long, slow chorales of praise and benison shall rise between the furrows. I say " day of days," but luckily every vineyard is not ready to be gathered on the same day. The ripeness of each hill varies according to the position, the soil, the degree of care expended, and scientific cultivation. But during those three weeks before the " Lese," it is true that I was impressed by the sight of quiet, satisfied men and women, dressed, not in striking colours, but in plain hodden grey, going about with the calm light of pleasurable expectation on their faces, giving their thanks at wayside shrines, where they obviously vowed, from the depths of their simple and devout hearts, peace to men of good will because this was such a good vintage year. They did not dance to pifferari, or sing to the sound of zithers, but the true lyric note of thankfulness was in their voices as they mumbled the obligatory " Tag !" of civility. ..." Tag !" they always said, passing me on the road or looking down on me from the carts those long waggons made of two ladders and drawn by two oxen, piled with empty baskets, and the scarlet and emerald wine- press throned in the middle, on their way to the vineyards. And many of the vineyards are very distant, and some of them almost inaccessible. Here, in the proper vine country, the crop is set anywhere, everywhere, up and down ravines, across and beyond streams, perched in every possible coign CH. xxi] "TAKE US THE LITTLE FOXES" 297 of a mountainous and jagged landscape, if only it may there catch the sun. The poor man, whose means do not admit of the purchase of good level sites, lays a little soil on the bare rock, plants, waters, tends and grows his few bushels as well as he can. This is the lowest, humblest end of the scale, but the point is that there is no peasant of this countryside who does not possess, be he never so poor, some little corner of a vineyard, and on this account is the joy of a good vintage so universal in the land. On the top of the scale are the domains of the great " Weinhand- lers,"with their tall buildings like factories, and vast machinery of distribution. The peasants mostly join together to found co-operative pressing associations called " Winzervereins." And there are the landed magnates with their purchased or inherited estates, situated on high, appropriate pinnacles of rock, topped by feudal castles the robber strongholds of fiction and of very real historic fact. Either their ancestors have lived in these castles time out of mind, as in the case of the owners of the famous Schloss Eltz, or they have purchased them and rendered them habitable and tastelessly magnificent. Ruin or habitation, such a favoured site is rigor- ously devoted to the culture of the vine. The modern German seigneur has no use for the hand- some approach, for those " park-like grounds " embosoming his mansion, which figure in the English agent's advertising circular; he prefers to grow the romantic grape up to his very doorstep, if so be that grapes will grow. The vines at Schloss Braunfels and Braubach seem to creep up and peer into the very windows, and doubtless the sight of 298 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxi so much property that is at once poetic and realiz- able affords the lord thereof considerable pleasure. And the commercial millionaire Geheimrath, owner of the famous castle at C , instead of looking down, as his predecessor might have done, from his robber fastness a modernized Schloss, perched high over the town, and dominating the Mosel Valley instead of looking down on fat convoys of merchandise which, at some slight personal risk, he would presently descend to harry and appropriate, can sit quietly at home in his modern-medieval armchair and gaze out of the window at his so practicable wealth lying all round him. It is his very own, secured to him and his heirs by no desperate deed, but by the power of the purse and the getting of the best chemical advice afforded by a paternal Government. Yes, he may sit there the livelong day with his august and titled house-party from Berlin or Frankfort and muse upon the beauty of utility. But that is not the view of Mr. George Moore, who in his latest book declares that he knows nothing more unpicturesque than a vineyard, and that " a hillside planted with them is abhorrent." No one could surely be less Teutonic in sympathy than Mr. George Moore, but even an alien who wishes to be as placable as possible may concede that at a little distance the effect of the neat planta- tion is somewhat hard. Berncastel, Cochem, Braubach, and the other feudal towers that crown nearly every peaked hill in Germany, manage to carry it off. The regular rows of vines, creeping up like an army of green spears like Birnam Wood CH. xxi] "TAKE US THE LITTLE FOXES" 299 come to Dunsinane seem to culminate dully enough in the little collection of sharp turrets that break out at the top, and surmount the rising tides of green. And all along the Rhine the enormous height of the hills renders their clothing negligible, as it were the hides of mastodons, gigantic and couchant. But, indeed, the comparatively low hills that border the Mosel and the Saar suggest to me rather the shaggy loins of short, rough-coated dogs, clipped down to the quick. One misses, of course, the soft, swathing clumps of foliage that clothe the slopes of the hills in England or Belgium. We will say that answers to the fur that covers the haunches of a Newfoundland or a collie. We do not get the modulations of colour that would be given by the inequalities of size and shape of the different trees and bushes, but " there is always the other bank," as Mr. Moore's patient friend, Edward Martin, pointed out. " Yes, it is higher and steeper," the professional grumbler replies ; and there are trees, but " and here is a sentence which every desirable alien should burn to avenge with every drop of her newly naturalized blood : " The trees in Germany seem to lose their beauty. They clothe the. hillside like gigantic asparagus." Nonsense ! Has our only Realist, who once placed a haystack in Peckham, never read his Tacitus, or heard of the monstrous oaks of the Black Forest, the high Eiffel, the Teutoburger Forest, or the Hartz ? I should rather like to see Mr. Moore set down before one of these on toast. . . . To me the vine plant, taken singly, is a pathetic object. The small, pyramidal, valuable thing appears so frail and tottery. Each plant, standing ever so 300 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxi little apart from its fellows, as if fully conscious and proud of its small but important individuality, reminds me of a mawkin at a fair, a doll dressed up like an Early Victorian lady in a gala gown, flounced right up to the waist, and the flounces composed of soft taffetas silk of faintly differing shades, or, if we must have Irish similes, like the late Lady Wilde, who dressed exactly like this. For the leaves grow all round in tiers and have, some of them, a curious, uncanny, coppery sheen. Those that have been chemically treated look iridescent a deadly poison- ous brown in the shadows, and of a sinister, greyish- blue where the light strikes them. No ; I should not care to be left alone in a carefully kept vine- yard in the magic time of evening when the sun has declined in the sky, and the fleeting shafts of sunset catch the swart tips of the leaves, and, like an enchanter's wand, point out the evil pathological smears and stains that pass unnoticed in broad day- light. But I am falling into the pathetic fallacy which Mr. Ruskin spent a whole chapter in condemn- ing in " Modern Painters." ***** It was the endeavour and constant custom of Herr Kramp, the landlord of the Hotel Prinz Carl in Treves, and a great vine-grower, to have a look in on as many of his vineyards as was possible at this season, consistently with the other calls on his time and attention. We asked him to let us accompany him on one of these occasions, and he ratified his dignified consent with one of those slow sudden smiles of his that we had grown used to. His moon- face, with the button mouth, had something Oriental CH. xxi] "TAKE US THE LITTLE FOXES" 301 about it. It was usually puckered into a due gravity, but now and again it melted into such a sweet and cynical curve as I fancy the mouth of the Pied Piper of Hamelin may have worn when he stepped into the streets, "smiling first a little smile." He had no English ; he had been chef in some large hotel in the United States the Waldorf Astoria, I believe and he sometimes, but not often, exchanged his native language for that of America. I once observed him fondling a fine, fat boy, tucked up in a perambulator outside the hotel, and asked him politely whose baby it was. His laconic reply, " Mine ! Sure !" was a masterly blending of German unctuosity and American dryness. Yes, he had been a chef, but the cooking at his hotel was bad so we thought, but did not say. Even this truly superb cellar cannot wash away the memory of those dreary, flavourless, unblessed dishes. " Zander gebak mit Butter," and " Junger Hahn mit " something else, Junger Hahn that would never see three again. We never complained, because our rooms were so clean, and anyone who has lived in England knows that cleanliness, coming next to godliness, infallibly, somehow or other, means "cuisine a Teau." Later on Herr Kramp volunteered this piece of information unsought. He said that at the beginning of his career as chef at the Waldorf Astoria he had given his clients the best he knew, but that he soon found that no one in the city of haste had the leisure to dis- criminate between his successes and his failures, so that at last he had lost all heart for his art, and not even returning to his Fatherland where, as a rule, cooking does not in all its items resemble warm, 302 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxi moist, pink indiarubber, or gummy sawdust even his repatriation had not given him back any gusto of the casserole. But if his kitchen neither enthralled him nor occupied much of his time, his cellars certainly did this, and more. The wine trade and the hotel trade seem to go very kindly hand in hand in Germany. Herr Kramp's brother, also a Weinhandler, was the land- lord of another hotel in the city, and his father, who was staying with him all through this auspicious season of the grape, was the landlord of an im- portant hotel in Thuringia, and was also a wine merchant. The father was of a more commonplace type ; he had the air of a vieux militaire, and an enormous paunch, which he wore not in the least deprecatingly, though he acknowledged its inconvenience. And he accompanied us on that particular grey day in September to a certain vineyard which his son owned near Trittenheim on the Mosel. Trittenheim is the next village to Cluserath, which figures in the guide-books as the longest village in Germany, for it is merely a mile-long double row of houses, a backbone with no ribs. And there is no railway to it, exactly, but we under- stood that we could make the little Mosel Bahn serve and our legs too. The train would drop us at a village where there was a convenient ferry across to the other sunnier bank where the vine- yards were. The small train took us very slowly, turning and twisting in obedience to all the bends of the river. The carriages have vast plate-glass windows, so CH. xxi] "TAKE US THE LITTLE FOXES" 303 that passengers can feast their eyes step by step, or sleeper by sleeper, on the " schoener Aussichten." There are tables fixed in the centre of each hand- some saloon carriage, covered with the usual red- checked tablecloth. (I never drink Rhine or Mosel wine, or even beer for the matter of that, without thinking of a tablecloth with red squares.) A brass fiddle, such as one has on board ship, was placed across it to retain the glasses and the slippery napery as well. For, of course, people drink when and where they happen to be thirsty in Germany ; they have not to go to a special, indispensable emporium for drink as they are obliged to do in England. They do not drink beer, for in the wine country that is regarded as a social crime ; so it was Mosel wine the attendant supplied as a matter of course, and there they sat, Joseph Leopold and the two Kramps, with their glasses in their hands, and the priest with his breviary in his, amiably discuss- ing the vintage and the prices current of the grape. The Mosel is about as wide as the Thames at Marlow or Goring, but by no stretch of the imagina- tion could I have thought it was the Thames. It looks so lazy, and it is so swift. In the part that the line was now marching with it is not navigable. Little spits of shore, manoeuvred into breakwaters, run out from the south bank, the side on which we were travelling. I did not notice any on the other. There the reddish earth shelves in and is undercut, just as the banks of the Thames deplorably are, though there are no steamers here to do it with their wash. Straggling herbs and flowers grow on it, as the melilot and willow grow at Goring or 304 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxi Pangbourne, but still it does not look the same. It looks " wilder," as children would say ; " haunted," as their elders might feel, especially as I saw it to-day, flattened out under low, grey clouds, " a stream that hears the flowing of all men's tears beneath the sky." Yes, that was it, it was haunted ; there was some- thing unearthly in its opaque, green-grey calm, its steady, relentless, cynical flow, through a region abandoned perhaps under a curse a country seen in a dream through glass. No, not a curse ; a spell such as, according to holy Grimm, any old knock- kneed, wall-eyed witch has power to throw. It was the day, it was the place, when Two Eyes whose envious sisters Three Eyes and One Eye could not endure her because she saw exactly like other people sat down on the ridge of grass (it is there to-day, it forms one of the breakwaters of this undammed river) to cry because she had not enough to eat. Here it was that the Prince, who is happily always at hand to succour unmerited mis- fortune in these sociologistic tales, came to her and asked her why she was crying. I imagine him in the gilt scales of a Roman centurion, girt with a short sword, with bare golden locks, and arms and face dyed by the same sun that colours the grape, till they have the colour of newly tanned leather. It was here, too, that the persecuted Princess with the unprepossessing but royal attribute of hair made of gold and silver in equal proportions, leant over the river's brim to drink, and wrought, a spell so that the little hat of Conrad, the neatherd, CH.XXI] "TAKE US THE LITTLE FOXES" 305 flew away, and he could not touch her hair that he so presumptuously admired. For she was a King's daughter, and carried portable spells about with her as a modern Princess would carry her card-case and her smelling-salts. This lady possessed three drops of blood, wrapped in a napkin that her royal mother had given her, and as she leant down to drink the napkin floated away down the stream, and the three drops of blood spoke for her when the time came. That is the story. A little farther on was the rustic bridge that the Fisherman bent over when he was sad, to gaze into the stream until a beautiful Nix raised her head from the ripples, and spoke to him kindly and comforted him. Yes ; they might all have been there these shy heroes and heroines of my youth. It was by them that the stream was haunted. A succession of little red-roofed villages came in sight ; bend of the river followed bend ; the steep cliffs of the banks covered with the shaggy vines, and more quiet pastures. To-day the vines did not hang formal and lonely ; the gatherers were crawling about among the patches like black and white ants, unrecognizable from the opposite bank as human beings. It made the hills appear to be alive to be moving. For indeed, all the world was out there picking grapes. "Some little town is emptied of its folk," Joseph Leopold quoted,* having joined me at the window. There came another sudden and outrageous bend, and another of these empty little towns came into view and then more wide hill-sides covered with * j. L. F.IM. H. 20 306 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxi human ants. I questioned every now and then, as in a fairy story : 41 Is that your vineyard, Herr Kramp ?" And the answer was always, " Noch weiter a little farther on!" At last we left the train at Unheim, where there was a convenient ferry for the vine-slopes. We embarked on an ancient boat, with a still more ancient ferryman so ancient that he might well have been he whom St. Christopher hailed on that wild, black, and surely German night when the Christ Child called across the rushing stream. We were slowly, dreamily floated across the shallows, amid the sound of the ripple on the bows mingled with the soft hum of vine-talk. A little later in the afternoon we were landed on the working bank, and started to walk back a long way to Herr Kramp's vineyard. We went in Indian file, the river just below us and the vineyards precipitously ascending at our sides. Herr Kramp senior, with his paunch, waddled swiftly the last of the file of us. We had a couple of miles to go and I felt some pangs of consideration for his eighty years over the path that, slippery and narrow, climbed now to the shale of the vineyards, and then plunged down amid blackberry thickets, down to the very water-smoothed marbled boulders of the stream- bed itself. But I soon left off pitying him or depre- cating the length of the excursion on his behalf, because it was quite easy to tell that of all the four of us he it was who most thoroughly enjoyed it. He was having the time of his life ; and they were not his own vines, or even his son's. CH. xxi] "TAKE US THE LITTLE FOXES" 307 Shouting, singing, jodelling, throwing out exple- tives, the old man blundered along, ravishing huge bunches of "Himmelschoene Trauben" from the vine-stocks as he passed one estate after the other ; he offered them to us broadcast. For his son was a very great Weinhandler in that part of the country, and we were all privileged persons. There is no paling, no apparent division, no fence between the properties ; you have but to stretch out your hand, and to help yourself. Yet Joseph Leopold says there is no stealing ; it would not be patriotic, and it would not be worth while. As a matter of fact, between one allotment and another there is usually, by way of a " term," or landmark, an iron pole set up. On this there will be an enamelled label, and on these labels you may read the mighty names of the Gebrue- der Deinhard or the Koenigliche Domaene, or the names of the smallest peasants. . . . All that day I was eating grapes. In one day I ate more grapes than I had ever eaten in my life not excepting the time when I had scarlet fever, and lost my taste for the things that swell to enormous purple tastelessness in English hothouses, for ever- more. From the hands of all four of us depended continuously bunches of grapes ; grapes quenched our thirsts ; grapes ballasted us on the rocky marble pinnacles beside the shallows ; the juice of grapes streamed from our mouths, and with that same juice were our hands wet. As fast as we had partaken of the produce of one vineyard we were invited to test another's. It was what one might call a grape- crawl, and I wondered if the hardened sinners, male and female, in England, slouching drearily past one 308 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxi public-house after another, in rain, and mud, and sleet, would not have enjoyed the harmless variety of the unintelligent pursuit as much as a gin-crawl ? . . . Perhaps not ; perhaps the male sot and female drudge would have replied like the sated Duchesse de Longueville : " Que voulez-vous que je vous disc? Je n'aime pas les plaisirs innocents." " Glorious ! Splendid ! Praise the Lord !" the fine old German gentleman behind me muttered, polish- ing off one bunch after another, stripping round globe after round globe off from its stalk as he walked along. And from time to time, indeed, he burst into a shout at sight of a laden tree such a real shout and roar of praise that I thought at first, not knowing his dialect very well, that he was enraged at the misdeeds rather than overjoyed at the good fortune of his neighbours. . . . And all the while we were strip- ping the round globes from the wet stalks. I should not have dared for a moment to drop to the ground the fleshy envelope of the god of Herr Kramp's adoration. And there was no need to do so. The skins were quite soft, and no hand but my own had ever touched them. And old Herr Kramp's paean was one of the most gratifying and spiritually beautiful workings of the mind that I have ever witnessed. To hear him break forth into jubilation and thanksgiving, to see him craning up, stretching his troublesome stomach longitudinally as he raised his short arms, prolonged by a forked stick, to pull down into his purview the boughs of fruit-bearing trees that fringed the vine- yards, and became more common as we approached the villages all these things, ejaculations, smiles, CH. xxi] "TAKE US THE LITTLE FOXES" 309 roars of joyful laughter, the whole being of the man stretched to express satisfaction and gratitude all these things seemed to be an essay in pure thanks- giving as one might make essays in the art of pure music, or pure art for the sake of the art all these things seemed, since none of the fruit-trees were his nor the vines, to render more pleasant and more good that great green landscape that lay beneath a sky like a jewel, and a sun that hung breathless and motionless, as if it gazed with wonder upon its own work. It was pure religion. A simple piety for, although just now the vine was the thing and the sky was actually grey, he could take an interest in all the other kindly fruits of the earth and the other harvests of this remarkable year, that seemed for so long to have lain beneath that sky and that sun that it was difficult to gaze upon them in the greyness, and forget that of which they were the real expression. So that it seemed that the fruits themselves radiated a tranquil sun- shine. And apples, plums, and pears the reddest, the purplest I have ever seen, except the shiny produce of the Dominion of Canada that one sees behind plate-glass at the top of Whitehall, and that seem monstrous and unreal, as if they had been fabricated out of waxes and soaps plums and pears showed me their blushing beauties one after the other, as the boughs that bore them were pulled down for a moment and allowed to fly back again by the enthusiastic old fellow. And now I know the meaning of that verse of the English Litany that I had so often heard droned out without unction or emotion in numberless village churches in poor, rain- 3io THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxi sodden, caprice-ridden England. (I am alluding to the caprice of the elements, wrought on an unfortu- nate island, of which no spot on an average is farther away from the sea than eighty miles an island swept continually by the sea-fret, and dominated by the mountain gloom.) " The kindly fruits of the earth, so that in due time we may enjoy them " the irony of it ! How not admire the proud patience that finds in Shake- speare's lines, "a precious stone, set in a silver sea," a panacea for Tariff Ills, and a climate that has no equal for contrariness. In Germany, too, there are elemental reverses, but they are not normal. The vine crop may be ruined by the rain in one dismal year like 1910, but a good year coming once in seven will restore the balance. And 1911 was more than a good year, it was a superb year. The cultivation of the vine depends more than any other avocation on the personal care bestowed on it the personal care of a perspicacious and experi- enced cultivator. It is an expensive business to begin with ; good plants and planting will cost any- thing up to 40 an acre, and then, given a fairly decent soil, the growth must be nursed and tended like a baby for six or seven years before it will show signs of bearing a paying crop. It must be heavily manured, and the manure and everything must be carried as a rule on men's backs. There is no other way. In some cases the plot lies so steeply as to be almost perpendicular, and always the ground is so covered with shale and loose rock that the cultivator has difficulty even in keeping his foothold. Even the very soil has often to be carried up liter- CH.XXI] "TAKE US THE LITTLE FOXES" 311 ally in hodsful, much in the same way as, so we were told at our mother's knee, the bare volcanic rock of Malta was prepared for human cultivation. As the caddie at golf places a little heap of sand for the ball to rest on, so the soil has been laid, and here and there the absolutely unplantable crests and peaks of basalt jut out from the mat of green that seems to mount them knee-high. Some of these peaks have been cleverly blasted into terraces, banked up, as it were, by a naked wall of rock that shines out white as milk. The surface has been whitewashed in order to reflect the maximum of light and heat for the vines. The sun the poetry and life of the vine above ; and below the manure the prose. Manure ! well, though there is not much that is creditable about it, yet there is a great deal that is macabre and grotesque. For the vine is said to prefer some very strange varieties of composts. Leather is favoured by the capricious plant ; an old pair of boots is very sov'ran, and if you want the vine at your door to flourish and attain unto the very roof-tree you had better ensure its growth by first laying down an old leather portmanteau before you plant it. One is driven to think of an older and more savage form of what may be, after all, a mere superstition, though Joseph Leopold swears that it is a chemical fact. Did ever the body of a young child fructify a vineyard in the olden days, or at best the un- considered body of a captive or a slave ? And back go one's thoughts to the legend of Dionysius, and the sacrificial knife seems to be flourished over the dark soil whence springs the dark twisted stock ; 3 i2 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxi nay, further back, to the first Feast of the Passover, when the lintels of the doors were washed in blood. In England to-day you may hear the echo of the savage notion in the chant of the hordes of the re- generate as they roam through quiet country villages on the Sabbath Day : " Washed in the blood of the Lamb." . . . The officers of the Salvation Army, like the priests of old, do not, probably, suffer from too much imagination, as, all unconscious of the terrible traditional force of the words, they shout their terrible refrain for an hour or so, and then go in to their well-earned teas. And be sure the family Kramp did not think of these things as we walked, Indian file, along the narrow path, weltering vineyards upon the one hand and the calm Mosel on the other. The son's little button mouth was pinched in calculation, the father's toothless one was roaring out : " Te Deum laudamus." The carts with winepresses ready poised in them stood about, waiting for their loads the brimming hodsful that peasants were all the while carrying to them down the steep hill-sides. When the bearers had descended to the carts they climbed up short ladders and upset the hods into the winepresses, very much as an English dustman empties refuse into the borough cart, with an " Ouf !" of relief. For hours they had come stumbling down the narrow tracks which were all the space the owners of the vineyards had been able to spare for transport. On these channel beds, like mere water- courses, where torrential rains seemed only yester- day to have rushed down, there lay enough loose stones to make a careless step dangerous to men CH.XXI] "TAKE US THE LITTLE FOXES" 313 burdened as these porters were, with enormous receptacles filled by the women pickers-up among the vines. They are shaped like a dustman's basket and strapped on to the back of the porter; they are sometimes made of osier work of leather, but most often of a green-painted metal, which has the effect of making the grape-carriers appear like shard- beetles or men in armour. Some of them emptied their hods into the carts, the rest went straight down to the ferry-boats which were waiting to take them and their burdens, just as they stood, to the village on the other side. When half a score men, backed by their hods, packed into the boat, they were nearly lost to sight behind the enormous stack of metal they bore. Their heads appeared to peep modestly round the corners of the hods, and one imagined a boat full of armed warriors hiding behind their bronze shields, sheltering from arrows. One man sat like a bonze in his cart, behind his winepress that was full of grapes. He was offering them as samples. As we passed, Herr Kramp, calm, suave, imperturbable, handled a bunch, tasted a grape, and lingered behind for a few seconds. . . . "Otto," said his father complacently, "is doing business." When Herr Kramp rejoined us he had just bought the entire produce of that man's vineyard about nine thousand gallons of must. He was as com- posed nay, more so as a stockbroker who has successfully beared some stock on Wall Street ; and we all went quietly on to the communal wine- press at Cluserath, where these grapes would be 314 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxi tested and paid for, and I should taste, for the first time in my life, the foaming must of poetry. We walked past the landlord's own vineyard, to which he gave only a cursory glance, for he had visited it the day before ; we went in, still eating grapes, through the cobbled streets of villages, each bearing some one of the favoured names that one sees on the labels of bottles dotted about on London supper-tables, till we came to a damp, dark-looking, but not unclean building whose stone courtyard was full of carts disgorging their slippery, shiny loads. In most of these carts a woman stood, like a goddess, demeaning herself with something like a trident. The wine- press, gaping for the grapes, was perched high on the cart, and she was by way of hastening matters, for there is no time to lose. On one cart the whole family was apparently engaged in " possing," as the washerwomen say in the North of England, pressing, bumping down wet masses of green globes that, already below, bursting with their own weight, ride up in the tub like a sea of mottled and yeasty green. All those hearty girls and boys had been helping to gather ; the day was hot ; they had taken off their coats and their jackets and their wraps of all sorts, and had piled them on the cart. It was a pell-mell of grapes exquisite, ethereal grapes, though beginning to look a little the worse for wear and the gross material trappings of poor, heated humanity. And everyone, like Herr Kramp, will have you taste ; everyone is flourishing a sample bunch in your face, and imploring you to try. To refuse would be churlish, and one has to forget " the dyer's hand, subdued to what it works in." CH. xxi] "TAKE US THE LITTLE FOXES" 315 We all went inside. Herr Kramp was much too busy to speak ; he was a great man, and he was buying more grapes. He was buying, I under- stood, this particular man's grape-juice straight off the cart, and he was having the quality tested, hodful by hodful, as they were brought in and turned out into the communal press placed over a tub. There are two wheels in the bottom of this utensil that work into each other, toothed and close- fitting, whilst the attendant turns the handle at the side with great ferocity. The flood of juice gushed out with a rustling, weltering sound, and one that was highly gratifying to me who stood beside and watched. It is delight- ful to see pressure applied and pressure yield so much, though it was not my grape-juice but Herr Kramp's. One is child enough to like to see any- thing squeezed and to listen to the handsome noise it makes. There is a certain cruel pleasure about it ; one fancies that the grapes resent the insult, feel pain, and cry out ! Then the liquor was tested. The communal officer had an exceedingly simple and rudimentary testing-tube, and only one, but I dare say it did its work all right. The long funnel of dull glass was taken off the window-sill where it lay, plunged into the must, and examined by the light of a yellow horn window, the only one in the place, and just a couple of feet square at that. The ingenuous peasant, whose care had brought this harvest to perfection, stood by, full of anxiety while his grape-juice was being put to the proof. His wife had come in with him to see that he got 316 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxi fair play, and she was obviously his master. For each hodful the superintendent called out the result of the test, the price was mentioned, and a fresh load was thrown in and subjected to the great indignity of pressing. That is what it began to seem to me, for the poor green globes looked so translucent, so innocent, so other-worldly. Herr Kramp bought the lot. He was, of course, far too busy to attend to me and see that I tasted the must, and, to tell the truth, I was no longer very anxious to taste it. Although Joseph Leopold, who has seen a score of vintages and who was now in an inner cell eating grapes with Herr Kramp Senior, as who should say, having a drink although Joseph Leopold said that " must " is most delicious, I could hardly believe him. The squeezed mass of grapes as it came out of the small press looked for all the world like the cheap dates that I used to buy in quarter-pound wedges with my own pocket- money on my way home from school. I was con- sumed for that hunger for eatable odds and ends that is the weakness of " flappers." That mess was brown ; this mess was green that was about all the difference. Things do not as a rule look appetizing after they have been squeezed and their identity utterly destroyed, and the pearly, opalescent spheres that I held in my hand seemed to bear no relation to the squalid -looking mass of ill -digested food rejected by the winepress. The contents of the first tub were at once thrown into a larger tub or vat, in which the juice was already beginning to ferment, and looked still more unpleasant. Then the mixture of squeezed grapes, CH. xxi] "TAKE US THE LITTLE FOXES" 317 the half-dried residuum, were put into a larger receptacle still, a press with handles that it took at least four men to turn. This, like the tubs that now held the first juice, was connected by a pipe with the cellars below, for these immense, final presses had the function of squeezing out the last drop of must. They squeezed from the dull green and drooping skins of the grapes not only the last drop of moisture, but even the very colour, so that what remained looked like nothing in the world but hard cattle cake, for which indeed it is not seldom used. I was taken down into the cellar, and gazed without much interest, but with some awe, into the enormous barrels. For the process was now carried on as it were behind closed doors. The must was to remain there to ferment and mature for quite a long period, putting off from its spirit all that was corruptible. The next time I should see it would be glowing and glancing into a tall glass on a white damask tablecloth, poured out by an indifferent footman some cold, callous creature, incapable of such generous enthusiasm for the liquor that was not destined to pass down his own throat as inspired Herr Kramp senior. That I should see that must again, or some of it, was literally true. One of those immense barrels was the property of Herr Kramp. Now, Joseph Leopold and I had given Herr Kramp an order for twenty-four dozen a barrique of this particular vintage, so the possibility, if not the probability, is that some of the liquid that was then beginning its long sleep in that tun will cheer and inspire our own 3 i8 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxi table, whenever Joseph Leopold shall decide that our own particular barrels that are new arrivals in our own particular cellar, having only just outpassed the perils of the swift Rhine and the fell and stormy sea, shall be fit for the tremendous and house-shaking event that is called " bottling." We do the bottling. The autumn evening shadows were beginning to settle on the green meadows, the green hills, the green vines, and to infuse into that landscape the forlorn touch of greyness which warns loiterers to hurry, and over all the fields of this pious country sets the beads clicking at the Angelus. We had to walk through two vine villages on our way to the horse -ferry that was opposite Thornich station. The names of these villages were familiar enough to me. How small and unimportant they seemed ! And yet they bore names that reverberate over continents and oceans, and catch the eye in every railway- station in Germany. Berncastler Doctor, Pies- porter, Ober-Emmeler, printed so big in wine lists, stand for dear little domestic assemblages of white- faced, one-storied houses, against which lean pig- sties and cow -byres, hung with squirrels and magpies in cages, the goats and geese picking their ways between the rough cobblestones, the grey- green household jugs hanging like tall hats upon the palings. . . . Still bearing our last bunches of grapes, we entered the little station, and there I found that I was not the only grape fiend. Every other person in the waiting-room of the station reminded me of the Bible pictures that tried to elevate my childish mind each one was bearing his grapes of Eshcol in CH. xxi] "TAKE US THE LITTLE FOXES" 319 one form of package or another. There were girls rather undersized, these, and ill-dressed, looking like little London dressmaker's hacks ; but instead of cardboard boxes in which " creations " were packed, there depended from their elbows all sorts of knobby-checked bundles, and knotted checked handkerchiefs, from which there slipped and fell on to the polished floor the current spheres of translucency of which we had thought all the day. There were widows they looked like widows? with baskets and cruses; grape-juice was running composedly out of the corners of them. There were unmistak- able pairs of lovers holding vine-trails in their disengaged hands. Other unclassable passengers bore sprays of the holy plant, wreathed, not in their hair, but done up in their umbrellas. Little wet dusty marbles ran about on the dusty floor and were soon trodden into circles of wet sticki- ness ; a three-cornered bundle, made of an apron or a handkerchief, is an ineffectual and weary envelope for such an exuberant, polished entity as the grape, full of stored-up spirit and sunlight. Presently, however, we all packed into our train with grapes inside and out. Herr Kramp and his father were not with us. They had slyly given us the slip at Cluserath, and were staying behind to celebrate the great feast of the year in at least three inns so I have since gathered. They would talk it over with every fresh Wirth, and probably Herr Kramp would buy more grapes, for he is a great Weinhandler. But this thing is sure for the next fortnight on the Mosel, no man, woman, or child will talk except 320 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxi in terms of the grape. The talk will be gay and cheerful as the minds that inspire it, for this year no South German will even entertain painful thoughts. Old quarrels will be made up, bad debts paid off, heirlooms will be bought in again, and the back year of mourning forgotten. In that year, when the vine suffered so terribly the cattle prospered and waxed fat. The year after the cruel sun, murderer of the horned beasts that wandered spiritlessly about the brown fields where the grass had died, and lowed and yearned for a lush pasture, and whose lean, nervous bodies were eaten by us en maugreant the sun gave the juice of the grape to wash down the indifferent repast. The pestilential heat which drove men wild till they murdered their wives and children, which maddened strike committees and filled the Courts of Justice, which nearly forced three nations into war one week of rain, that year, it was patent to the world, would have sent the English rioters slouching home, and would have brought the tetchy and absurdly protracted negotia- tions of German and English courts alike to a good- humoured and speedy conclusion the sun, that worked all this mischief, also provided the antidote, and was all the while fostering the peace-dealing grape. " Glory be !" I cry, with old Herr Kramp. CHAPTER XXII ENVOI ON New Year's Day I heard Mass in Aix-la- Chapelle Aachen over the tomb of Charlemagne, Joseph Leopold's hero. But as a matter of fact we were staying in Belgium, within a motor-ride, a walk, a stroll of Germany. And it seemed, oddly enough, as if Germany, the country which, like Sir James Barrie's sweet Scotch heroine, boasts " no charm," still contrived to draw us. We could not keep away from it. And I had a strong desire to savourer the sensation of actually crossing a frontier on my two legs. To cross a frontier in a train one has done it scores of times can give no particular thrill; the great station at Herbestal is like any other station, except that the station-master looks like a gentlemanly chasseur, and the evidence of its international character consists in the tiresome business of having one's luggage examined. No, the thrill lies in doing it on foot. Then one can picture vedettes and soldiers of both sides, good, decent fellows who have no desire to be at each other's throats, fraternizing over their drinks, stand- ing, as they exchange amenities, with a leg on each side of the imaginary line of demarcation. I am 321 21 322 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxn told they actually did this during the Franco- Prussian War. I don't know how they behaved in Belgium, that poor little buffer State, guaranteed immune by all the Powers and perfectly safe to be constituted the lists for this combat when it does come. France is ready. France is belligerent. The posters are up as I write. And that autumn we rolled along the smooth, dull roads towards Germany; the two delightful G's Belgians Joseph Leopold and I, a fair Spadoise, and two samples of those charming people who are of no nation but who inhabit Belgium. Warlike images were constantly in our minds, for it was the year of the first war scare. Everybody, for every sort of reason, was so very anxious that the Pax Britannica, the Pax Germanica, and all possible Paxes should be preserved. And to Joseph Leo- pold, the German who really knew, all sorts of little curious searching questions were addressed. And out of the serene depths of his German conscious- ness Joseph Leopold assured us : " There will be no war!" But as we passed and approached the frontier I shed my wrappings and stood up in the car now and then, to look at and consider certain strange geographical features before me that reminded me of English north-country slag-heaps, ending in an overturned wheelbarrow. This gave the usual wild air of unfinishedness, and it was aided by the trun- cated rails that lay along the top of the long, low earthwork, and were cut off sharply too. . . . " What are those ?" I said. " German railway-lines," said Joseph Leopold. CH. xxn] ENVOI 323 11 But why are they left like that unfinished ?" "They can't carry them any farther than the frontier as yet. But they are ready." The sinister significance of his speech smote the whole earful of aliens. The courteous Belgians were silent. I confess that from that moment the possibilities of war became more real to me, and I remembered what had happened the month before. Germany had called in all her gold, and in the town where I was staying Trier, a frontier town there was not an ounce of it to be had. I remembered the sudden sound of rub-a-dub that used to come up out of the valleys to us strolling on the heights. I remembered the conversations that I used to hear in drawing- rooms, the sly talk of the Reserves would they be allowed to go home ? the terror of the Socialist menace that this scare neutralized, and the congratu- lations on the victory of the Government. It passed off then; Herr Kidderlen- Waechter's diplomacy was successful, and the little recruits crowded the great stations of France and Germany in their thousands. I myself had watched them that year in Paris, coming in late by the Gare de 1'Est. I stood with the wives and mothers on trucks and carts in the entry to that outlandish station, and with dif- ficulty picked out my own man, who happened to be travelling on that line, from the hordes disgorged by the last train. This was real, then, a veritable menace. The frontier at once assumed terrific proportions in my mind. All this innocent, dull, and smiling country seemed to my eyes now covered with men marching, 324 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxn men detrained from those truncated conductors of ruin and strife, placed there like blunted ends of swords yet terribly significant . . . Thus far and no farther as yet ! . . . We were bowling along on open heath-fringed roads, up ascents, down declivities of low heath- covered hills, blue on the horizon that was Germany. ... It all looked alike, but I felt the sense of imminence so strongly that I almost jumped as Joseph Leopold said composedly : " Germany down there, just before we begin to go up again ! You'll see the squashed crow in a minute." In the turn of the valley there was an ordinary tiled cottage, set bare and gardenless on the side of the ascending road. The eagle of Prussia was spread in the usual spatch-cocked way on an unpretending signboard beside it. The douane ! Had we anything to declare ? We had descended. The chauffeur shook his head. Some paper was given us by the burly Prussian officer who sat behind a grille inside this cottage on the heathery waste, and who came out politely to see what we were like; then mutely passed us on. We were free of Germany ! The country looked just the same the villages too. German characteristics did not appear so early. But a few miles farther on the familiar rows of grey pots appeared, hat-like, stuck on the gate- posts, and then some geese more geese and a whitewashed house with broad, blue-painted rafters. I was at home. The rub-a-dub, too. Military manoeuvres were being carried on somewhere not CH. xxn] ENVOI 325 very far off on the broad park-like plateau we had now attained. The place we were bound to, Montjoie, so the Spadoise lady frequently told us, was supposed to be a gem of a town, lying very low in a kind of Vessel, but possessing a fine old castle, which was throned on the rock high above the town. We should see a curiously and wildly picturesque place, the physical features contributing, and all in a ridicu- lously small compass. Also it was, according to another member of our party, Mr. C , a very happy hunting-ground for old furniture. And we ascended hills and descended mountain gorges, like those in the Ardennes country, clothed with heavy pines and firs, luxuriant and well watered. And by-and-by we came to Montjoie. Itwas perched on a set of granite cliffs, whose height equalled the hills we had descended to get down into the valley. The river wound stilly, smugly, in among the cliffs. The houses of the little town, creeping about on its banks, were entirely dominated by the castled steep and hidden until the road, wandering among the gorges of the cliff, led us into the kernel of the valley where it lies. I have seldom seen a more spectacular place, and as we penetrated farther I could not help thinking of the last chromo-lithograph I had seen of some impossible piece of place por- traiture prepared for the outside of a chocolate-box. Down these sheer steeps, from the ruined chocolate- box castle, as on the back sheet of the stage in my first pantomime, I could have imagined that I saw fairies, slung in paper festoons, come sliding, glissad- ing down to Pantaloon in front of the stage, fluffing 326 THE DESIRABLE ALIEN [CH. xxn out their skirts and beginning their pointed-toe dance. For here there are bridges over the foaming stream, and stage-houses with balconies hanging over the torrent every sort of papier mdche effect crowded into a small space. The great shale cliffs of an inky blackness overhang the little streets lying in the shadow, sunless as Victoria Street at noon- day, but shot through by shafts of sunlight from above. Small fir-trees, planted all along both sides of the street, lining them with green, as it were a box for packing fruit or sweets, brushed the wheels of our car and added to the strange stagey effect. It was an accidental one, and only for the day we were here. These trees were staged, not planted, for the Kaiser had just visited Montjoie. The yellow paper roses that festooned the pink house of Commercienrath S had not yet faded after their manner, for it had not rained since. A very tall magnificent house was that of Herr S , with ogival windows and a double perron, and a fine Renaissance door. Inside there was a set of beautiful furniture which we were permitted to see, as Herr S had gone away at once after the auspicious visit. As a matter of fact, he always permitted his concierge to make an honest penny by showing his possessions. And his house was only the ordinary plain house of a German gentle- man of rank and family tres digne, tres comfortable, full of objects which to him were family heirlooms. Then we all lunched at the hotel and drank healths all round in good, cheapish Rhine wine. The healths of several nationalities, for Belgian, English, German, and French all these nationalities were CH. xxn] ENVOI 327 represented round the table in the little saal. The ceiling, after the good old German fashion, was stuck full of corks that had been precipitated from bottles of mine host's honest cellar. The hotel was an old mansion, and the stairs were worth seeing carved, oldish, fairly good. Montjoie is like a freak of Germany, queer, wonderful, and uncanny. Yes, it reminded me of a Conte d'Hoffmann, and it " came " wonderfully on a picture postcard. 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